_ „ .  .  . _ _ _ 

BV  4501  . G68 
Green,  Peter,  1871- 
Personal  religion  and  publ: 
righteousness 


VJ\  ^ 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND  PUBLIC 


RIGHTEOUSNESS 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/personalreligionOOgree 


1  ooq 

—  v;  -J -J 


PERSONAL  REL 

AND 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


A  BOOK  FOR  LENT 


BY  THE 

REV.  PETER  GREEN,  M.A. 

CANON  OF  MANCHESTER 
CHAPLAIN  TO  H.M.  THE  KING 


WITH  AN  INTRODUCTION  BY 

THE  LORD  BISHOP  OF  LONDON 


LONGMANS,  GREEN  AND  CO. 

39  PATERNOSTER  ROW,  LONDON,  E.C.  4 

NEW  YORK,  TORONTO 
BOMBAY,  CALCUTTA,  AND  MADRAS 

1923 


Made  in  Great  Britain 


To  the  Memory  of 

Leonard  Dendy  Agate,  M.A.,  Cantab  et  Mane. 

Priest 

who  during  his  short  ministry  at  home  and  abroad 
served  with  fidelity  and  devotion,  and  exercised  a  wide 

influence  for  good, 
this  book 

written  in  his  study 
is  affectionately  dedicated  by 
the  Author. 


v 


INTRODUCTION 


This  is  in  my  opinion  a  most  excellent  book,  and  if  I 
mistake  not,  wall  be  looked  upon  as  one  of  the  most 
spiritually  helpful  books  of  all  the  long  series  which  we 
have  issued  in  Lent. 

The  main  contention  of  it  is  summed  up  truly  and 
well1  at  the  end  of  the  seventh  chapter — “  The  only 
obstacle  to  a  better  world  is  the  lack  of  a  great  many  more 
and  a  great  many  better  servants  of  God.” 

This  is  brought  home  in  chapter  after  chapter,  illus¬ 
trated  from  the  writer's  long  and  varied  experience  as  a 
parish  priest,  and  the  whole  forms  a  book  so  cogent  and 
so  interesting  that  you  cannot  put  it  down  till  you  have 
finished  it. 

To  explain  its  interest,  I  must  turn  against  the 
writer  one  of  his  own  stories.  Two  curates  were  being 
compared  with  one  another  by  an  old  lady  in  a  parish. 
One  had  left  for  some  other  work,  and  for  this  one  she 
had  a  kindly  feeling  and  said  that  she  was  praying 
for  his  future  work  ;  but  of  the  other,  the  one  who  had 
come,  she  said  that  he  “  had  saving  experience.” 

I  believe  it  is  because  Canon  Peter  Green  has  had 
“  saving  experience  ”  that  every  argument  tells,  and  the 
whole  book  “  finds  you."  I  think  that  out  of  the  many 
timely  warnings  contained  in  the  book,  the  one  most 
needed  to-day  is  the  warning  against  the  idea  that  “  the 
System  ”  is  the  bottom  of  all  our  social  ills,  as  he  tells  us 

1  Page  98. 
vii 


INTRODUCTION 


•  S  i 

Vlll 

all  his  young  Socialist  friends  imagine,  whereas,  as  he 
points  out,  no  change  of  “  System  ”  is  necessarily  going 
to  alter  character  ;  it  is  the  man  himself  who  has  to  be 
changed.  But  I  need  not  quote  any  more.  One  only 
spoils  a  beautiful  view  by  pointing  out  the  beauties  in 
detail,  and  my  belief  is — and  I  can’t  say  more — that  any 
man  or  woman  who  reads  this  book  and  takes  home 
its  many  lessons — will  be  a  better  man  or  woman. 

A.  F.  London  : 


PREFACE 

The  aim  and  motive  of  this  book  are,  I  think,  indicated 
with  sufficient  clearness  by  the  motto  I  have  prefixed 
to  it.  It  is  indeed  a  fair  and  necessary  question  to  ask 
whether  the  advance,  which  we  so  earnestly  desire,  in 
public  righteousness,  will  be  attained  without  a  great 
advance  in  personal  holiness.  Ten  years  ago,  writing 
on  the  topic  of  personal  religion,  I  suggested  that  the 
tasks  before  the  church  were  (i)  the  re-statement  of  the 
one  Faith  ;  (ii)  the  reunion  of  Christendom  ;  (iii)  the 
Conversion  of  the  World  to  Christ  ;  and  (iv)  the  applica¬ 
tion  of  His  teaching  to  social  needs.  To  these  tasks 
we  must  to-day  add  two  more  at  least,  namely  (v)  the 
refounding  of  civilization,  shaken  by  the  War  ;  and  (vi) 
the  discovery  of  a  way  to  international  brotherhood. 
Is  our  religion  adequate  to  these  tasks  ?  Are  we  good 
enough  ?  Or  is  it  true  that  “  the  children  are  come  to  the 
birth  and  there  is  not  strength  to  bring  forth  ?  ” 1  It 
is  my  own  deep  conviction  that  a  great  advance  in 
personal  holiness  will  alone  supply  the  necessary  power 
in  which  the  tasks  before  the  Church  will  be  performed. 
We  shall  “  receive  power,”  but  only  “  after  that  the 
Holy  Ghost  is  come  upon  us.”  2  Hence  the  line  I  have 
followed  in  this  book.  Chapter  I  discusses  the  futility 
of  all  attempts  to  do  good  without  trying  to  be  good. 
Chapter  II  treats  of  first  hand  religion  as  the  only  sort 
that  has  power.  The  next  four  chapters  discuss  the 

1  Isaiah  xxxvii.  3.  2  Acts  i.  8. 

ix 


X 


PREFACE 


question  of  the  knowledge  of  God,  and  the  ways  in  which 
souls  come  to  that  knowledge.  The  remaining  chapters 
seek  to  shew  how  this  first  hand  knowledge  of  God,  this 
religion  firmly  based  on  experience,  is  what  the  world 
needs,  and  how  it  may  be  used  in  the  world’s  serivce. 

It  may  well  be  that  some  of  my  readers,  anxious 
to  do  something  to  help  a  suffering  and  distracted 
world,  longing,  as  they  will  say,  to  "  get  to  work  to  help 
others,”  will  be  impatient  with  my  insistence  on  the 
need  for  personal  holiness,  personal  religion.  If  any 
reader  does  feel  that  impatience  I  can  only  repeat 
that  this  whole  book  is  inspired  by  nothing  else  but  the 
conviction  that  personal  holiness  is  an  absolutely 
necessary  preliminary  to  all  effective  social  service. 
For  what  the  world  really  wants  is  not  you  nor  me  but 
God.  And  He  can  only  shine  through  a  sanctified 
personality,  and  only  work  through  a  surrendered  will. 
When  we  have  perfectly  learned  that  truth  no  triumphs 
will  be  too  great  for  us  to  achieve. 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I. — god’s  LENTEN  CALL  TO  THE  SOUL.  .  ..  I 

II.  — THE  RELIGION  THAT  HAS  POWER  .  .  .  .  10 

III.  — THE  KNOWLEDGE  OF  GOD.  .  19 

IV.  — VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

(i)  MYSTICAL  .  28 

V. — VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

(ii)  MORAL  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  37 

VI. — VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE 

(iii)  PRACTICAL .  46 

VII. — THE  WORLD’S  NEED  OF  GOD  .  .  .  .  56 

VIII. — GOD’S  CLAIM  TO  BE  MASTER  .  .  .  .  66 

IX. — THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  DAILY  LIFE  .  .  .  .  75 

X. — THE  POWER  OF  GOD  UNTO  SALVATION  .  .  84 

XI. — THE  CHRISTIAN  IN  THE  WORLD  TO-DAY  .  .  94 

XI I . — THE  CHRISTIAN  AND  THE  COMING  KINGDOM  103 


xi 


"  It  is  a  fair  and  necessary  question  to  ask  whether 
we  have  not  reached  the  limits  in  our  advance  toward 
public  righteousness  without  a  corresponding  advance 
in  personal  religion.” 

From — The  Function  of  the  Church  in  Modern  Society. 

By  William  Jewitt  Tucker. 


Xll 


CHAPTER  I 


god’s  lenten  call  to  the  soul 

Lent  comes  to  ns,  year  by  year,  as  a  direct  call  from  God. 
A  call  to  greater  strictness  of  life,  more  earnest  thought 
on  serious  subjects,  more  strenuous  effort  after  holiness. 
And  since  it  is  really  true  that  "  the  penance  of  religious 
men  is  sweeter  than  the  pleasures  of  courtiers  ”  the  call 
is  a  welcome  one.  It  calls  us  from  care  for  things  that 
don’t  matter  to  care  for  things  that  do.  It  speaks  to 
us  of  struggles  and  victories  and  rewards  which  involve 
our  whole  nature,  and  the  highest,  best,  and  most  real 
part  of  our  being.  It  is  a  call  that  braces  us,  nerving 
us  to  efforts  which  even  while  we  shrink  from  them  we 
feel  to  be  worth  making.  And  while  it  demands  effort 
it  promises  a  more  than  adequate  reward.  The  lad 
who  said  “  I’m  glad  to-morrow  is  Ash  Wednesday. 
I  mean  to  have  a  good  strict  Lent  this  year.  Then  I 
shall  have  a  happy  Easter  ”  expressed,  in  simply  boyish 
words,  some  deep  spiritual  truths,  and  showed  that  he 
was  not  without  religious  experience  of  his  own. 

And  yet,  as  we  get  on  in  life,  does  not  a  certain  doubt, 
a  certain  depression,  mingle  with  this  anticipation  of 
Lent  ?  We  feel  that  we  have  gone  through  all  this  sort 
of  thing  before,  and  nothing  much  has  come  of  it.  We 
have  had  strict  well  kept  Lents,  times  when  religion 
was  a  pleasure,  and  prayerfand  worship  real  sources 

B 


2 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


of  strength  and  power,  when  God  and  the  soul  and  the 
unseen  things  of  the  spirit  were  more  real  than  the 
visible  and  tangible  things  of  the  world  around  us,  and 
yet  what  has  been  the  result  ?  We  have  always  slipped 
back  again  into  slackness,  carelessness,  worldliness. 
Perhaps  we  cannot  say  that  nothing  has  been  gained. 
But  we  feel  that  a  very  great  deal  of  spiritual  effort, 
of  hope  and  prayer,  and  high  endeavour,  has  yielded 
very  little  lasting  fruit  for  God’s  glory,  or  the  welfare 
of  others,  or  our  own  soul’s  growth.  We  ask  ourselves 
whether  the  Christian  life  is  always  to  be  a  weary  round 
of  sinning,  and  repenting,  and  trying  again,  only  to  sin 
afresh  and  need  a  fresh  repentance.  Surely  it  ought  to 
be  possible  to  make  the  Christian  life  a  really  victorious 
progress  “  from  strength  to  strength  till  we  appear, 
everyone  of  us,  before  our  God  in  Sion.”1  If,  even 
when  all  allowance  has  been  made  for  occasional  defeats, 
we  cannot  regard  our  soul’s  life  as  one  of  steady  progress, 
what  is  the  cause  ? 

Perhaps  at  times  we  are  tempted  to  doubt  the  power 
and  reality  of  religion  altogether.  The  joy  and  happi¬ 
ness  of  past  Lents,  we  are  tempted  to  think,  was  mere 
emotionalism,  stirred  feelings  which  settled  down  again 
without  effecting  anything.  We  worked  ourselves  up, 
or  let  others  work  us  up,  into  a  state  which  could  not 
last,  and  we  fear  lest  every  time  we  try  to  re-capture 
the  emotional  excitement  of  those  days,  we  should  find 
the  task  harder  and  the  results  less  permanent.  “  You 
have  tried  religion  ”  the  tempter  whispers,  “  and  found 
out  for  yourself  that  there  is  nothing  in  it.  You  will 


1  Ps.  Ixxxiv.  7. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


3 


be  a  fool  if  you  let  yourself  be  taken  in  again/’  And 
in  such  a  mood  it  is  terribly  easy  to  drop  religion  alto¬ 
gether,  or  at  best  to  fall  into  a  state  of  merely 
conventional  religious  observance. 

But  let  us,  at  this  point,  consider  something  Which, 
at  first  sight,  seems  to  have  nothing  to  do  with  What 
we  have  been  thinking  about  but  which  may  be  found 
to  have  a  very  real  connection.  Almost  every  clergyman 
who  has  been  any  length  of  time  engaged  in  parish  work, 
can  recall  cases  of  young  people,  both  men  an^  women, 
who  have  at  one  time  been  inspired  with  real  zeal  for 
social  work,  and  Who  have  declared  that  they  wished  to 
devote  all  their  lives  to  Working  for  the  betterment  of 
their  fellowmen.  But  sooner  or  later  they  became 
discouraged.  They  seemed  to  effect  so  little,  and  their 
fellow  workers,  whom  they  credited  with  a  zeal  like  their 
own,  revealed,  when  they  came  to  know  them  Well,  so 
many  unattractive  qualities,  and  the  people  they  Worked 
for,  and  whom  they  desired  to  help,  proved  so  sluggish, 
and  irresponsive,  and  ungrateful.  And  so  they  became 
disillusioned.  How  that  disillusionment  shews  itself 
will  depend  on  the  nature  of  the  individual.  Some  men 
come  to  disbelieve  in  human  nature  altogether.  Human 
nature,  they  say,  is  What  it  is,  and  only  a  fool  Will  try 
to  change  it ;  everyone  must  look  out  for  himself. 
And  so  the  man  Who  started  life  as  a  perfectly  sincere 
philanthropist  ends  it  as  a  self-seeking  grasper,  perhaps 
even  as  a  sanctimonious  hypocrite  who,  almost  uncon¬ 
sciously,  masks  his  own  selfishness  under  the  old  phrases 
about  service,  betterment,  and  the  uplifting  of  the  poor. 
It  may  well  be  that  the  reader  has  met  such  cases  himself. 
But  nobler  natures,  instead  of  growing  cynical  and  selfish, 


4 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


grow  bitter  and  angry,  angry  with  man  and  angry  with 
God.  Some  years  ago  I  had  such  a  man  talking  to  me 
in  my  study.  He  Was  a  socialist  who  had  spent  twelve 
or  fifteen  years  in  public  life  and  he  Was  angry  with  the 
rich,  for  what  he  thought  their  callous  indifference,  and 
angry  with  the  poor,  for  what  he  thought  their  slavish 
content,  and  angry  with  God,  for  allowing  such  things  to 
go  on.  And  when  he  had  talked  to  me  for  some  time, 
till  his  passion  brought  out  the  sweat  on  his  forehead 
in  great  drops,  I  said  to  him  “  Do  you  know  what  you 
remind  me  of?  You  remind  me  of  Jonah.  God  is  saying 
to  you  *  Doest  thou  well  to  be  angry  ?  ’  and  you  are 
replying  ‘  I  do  well  to  be  angry,  even  unto  death.’  But 
all  the  while  you  are  failing  just  because  you  lack  God, 
and  His  help/’  Is  not  this  true  ?  Is  not  the  chief,  one 
might  almost  say  the  only  cause,  of  the  failure  of  much 
of  our  social  work  the  fact  that  it  is  not  done  in  the  power 
of  the  Spirit  of  God,  and  so  the  Workers  deteriorate  as 
they  grow  older  ?  They  make  the  fatal  mistake  of  trying 
to  do  good  without  trying  to  be  good.  Nay,  they  often 
boast  that  they  have  no  time  to  think  of  themselves, 
or  their  ownfsalvation,  and  even  sneer  at  those  who  are 

as 

concerned  about  “  saving  their  own  dirty  souls.”  And  so 
the  weapons  of  their  Warfare — and,  no  matter  how  much 
our  Work  may  be  concerned  with  temporal  and  material 
things,  it  is  still  always  true  that  the  weapons  of  our 
Warfare  are  the  powers  of  our  souls,  our  sympathy,  that 
is  to  say,  and  our  patience,  and  our  unselfishness  and 
courage,  and  faith— get  blunted.  For  they  forget  that 
if  it  is  true  that  ‘  nothing  but  the  Infinite  Pity  is  sufficient 
for  the  infinite  pathos  of  human  life  ’  it  is  equally  true 
that  nothing  but  the  fruit  of  the  Spirit,  love,  joy,  peace. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


5 


long-suffering,  gentleness,  goodness,  faith,  meekness, 
self  restraint,  will  be  found  an  adequate  equipment  for 
anyone  who  aspires  to  be  a  Worker  with  and  for  his 
fellows.  Those  who  try  to  do  good  while  themselves 
cut  off  from  God,  the  only  source  of  all  good,  court 
failure  and  disappointment. 

What  has  all  this  to  do  with  that  lack  of  steady 
progress  in  holiness,  and  that  consequent  disillusionment 
and  dissatisfaction  with  our  religion,  Which  We  Were 
thinking  of  at  the  beginning  of  this  chapter  ?  Why 
just  this,  that  the  mistake  religious  people  make  is 
often  just  the  opposite  one  to  that  made  by  many  earnest 
and  sincere  social  workers.  They  are  so  busy  trying  to 
do  good  that  they  forget  to  try  to  be  good  ;  we  are  so 
anxious  to  gain  true  holiness  that  We  sometimes  forget 
that  even  this,  the  supreme  gift  of  God,  is  given  to  be 
used,  and,  if  not  used,  will  be  lost.  If  they  are  like 
soldiers  who  are  so  eager  for  victory  that  they  rush 
all  unarmed  and  untrained  into  the  battle,  are  not 
we,  too  often,  like  soldiers  who  make  our  drill  and  our 
evolutions  ends  in  themselves,  and  are  so  keen  on  keeping 
our  weapons  bright,  and  our  equipment  clean,  that  we 
never  descend  into  the  dust  and  turmoil  of  the  fight  ? 

Is  not  this  just  exactly  the  charge  which  many 
people  to-day  are  bringing  against  the  members  of  all 
the  churches  ?  When  we  blame  them  for  neglecting 
religion  they  reply  “  Well,  and  What  is  the  good  of  your 
religion  ?  What  is  the  fruit  of  all  your  church-going  ? 
To  whom  does  it  do  any  good  but  yourselves  ?  ”  And 
just  because  it  does  no  good  to  others  it  often  does  little 
good  to  ourselves,  and  so  our  critics  declare,  not  always 
without  some  shew  of  justice,  that  our  religion  is  merely 


6 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


selfishness  and  emotional  self-indulgence.  Nothing  will 
help  us  so  much  in  our  spiritual  life  as  to  look  on  it 
as  training  for  a  spiritual  warfare.  We  are  to  seek  true 
holiness  so  that,  body,  mind  and  soul  being  subdued  to 
the  guidance  of  God  the  Holy  Ghost,  He  may  be  able 
perfectly  to  work  through  us  for  the  salvation  of  the 
whole  world.  “  For  their  sakes  ''  said  Christ,  “  I 
sanctify  Myself/'1  and  it  is  for  “  their-"  sakes,  the  sake 
of  our  brethren  throughout  the  world,  that  we  must 
ask  Him  to  sanctify  us.  The  world  is  Wrong  to  despise 
holiness,  for  it  is  the  thing  most  needed  in  the  world 
to-day.  Nothing  has  such  power  as  true  holiness, 
nothing  exercises,  over  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men, 
such  an  attraction.  But  the  world  is  right  to  look 
askance  at  us  if  We  seek  holiness  in  any  spirit  of  selfish¬ 
ness,  and  not  that  we  may  use  it  for  God's  glory,  and  the 
help  of  our  fellow  men. 

Does  this  mean  that  everyone  who  seeks  truer  holiness 
this  Lent  must  take  up  some  special  work,  after  Easter, 
as  church  or  social  worker  ?  Certainly  not.  What  will 
help  us  to  persevere,  and  save  us  from  falling  back  into 
carelessness  and  indifference,  and  constantly  nerve 
us  to  fresh  efforts,  is  not  the  consciousness  that  we  are 
doing  some  particular  piece  of  work,  which  the  world 
can  recognise  and  estimate  at  its  true  value.  Still  less 
is  it  the  desire  to  see  the  fruits  of  our  efforts  here  and  now. 
No  !  what  will  nerve  us  and  sustain  us  will  be  the 
realization  that  We  are  not  Working  for  ourselves,  but 
for  our  Captain  of  Salvation,  and  our  fellow  soldiers  in 
the  great  war.  I  think  We  may  learn  a  lesson  from  a 
friend  of  mine,  an  elderly  Working  man,  Who,  being  over 

1  S.  John  xvii.  19. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


7 


sixty  when  War  broke  out,  joined  the  National  Volunteers 
and  Was  set  to  guard  a  railway  bridge.  At  first  there 
was  great  keenness  but  as  the  years  dragged  on  he  Was 
almost  the  only  man  who  retained  his  first  zeal.  After 
the  armistice  some  of  his  old  comrades  Were  chaffing 
him  about  his  drills,  and  Watches,  and  nights  on  guard. 
“  What  good  did  you  do  ?  ”  one  of  them  asked  him. 
“Nothing  ever  happened.”  “  No.”  he  replied  quite 
placidly  “  but  I  Was  there  if  I  Was  Wanted.  I  felt  I 
was  doing  my  bit.”  In  the  hour  of  England’s  need  he 
had  had  his  vision,  and,  having  once  had  that,  nothing 
seemed  to  him  trivial  or  useless  or  wearisome.  It  is  no 
light  thing,  in  Christ’s  great  War  between  good  and  evil, 
to  know  that  We  are  there,  if  we  are  Wanted,  and  by  His 
grace,  are  doing  our  bit. 

But  indeed  we  can  never  tell  how  or  when  God  will 
use  us,  and  the  great  thing  to  remember  is  that  What 
matters  is  very  much  less  what  We  do  than  What  We  are. 
Many  people  never  realize  this,  and  all  of  us  are  tempted 
to  forget  it.  Yet  if  We  think  carefully  we  shall  realize 
that  the  greatest  abilities,  the  most  ceaseless  activity, 
and  the  most  earnest  zeal  may  accomplish  little  if  faults 
of  character  and  temper  hinder  God  using  you  as  His 
instrument,  whereas  the  man  Who  is  really  good,  Who, 
that  is  to  say,  is  so  submitted  to  God’s  will  that  the  Holy 
Spirit  can  work  through  him  freely  and  unhindered, 
cannot  fail  to  achieve  great  things,  no  matter  how  small 
his  abilities,  how  restricted  his  sphere,  or  how  poor  the 
visible  results.  For  in  this  case  God  Himself  is  the 
worker  and  He  cannot  fail. 

During  the  War  I  had  an  example  of  the  compelling 
power  of  real  holiness.  Visiting  one  day  in  a  military 


8 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


hospital  I  asked  a  soldier  my  usual  opening  question 
“  What  Were  you  in  the  army  ?  R.C.  or  C.  of  E.,  or 
what  ?  ”  He  replied  “  The  Chaplain  said  I  Was  put  down 
C.  of  E.  because  I  Was  nowt  else."  I  looked  at  him  for 
a  moment  and  said,  “  I  dare  say,  but  that’s  not  true  of 
you  now.”  “  Eh,  no,”  he  replied,  “  I  found  God,  out 
there  in  France,  and  life  won’t  be  long  enough  to  shew 
Him  I’m  not  ungrateful.”  And  then  he  Went  on  to  tell 
me  of  his  conversion.  He  Was  first  led  to  think  seriously 
of  religion  by  the  silent  example  of  a  young,  undersized, 
quite  undistinguished  private  in  the  same  company  as 
himself.  And  his  discription  of  the  man  is  Worth  giving 
in  his  own  words  “  Eh  !  he  was  a  good  little  fellow.  I 
wanted  to  be  like  him.  In  training  in  England,  and  out 
there  in  France,  in  the  trenches,  and  in  the  rest  camp, 
by  day  and  by  night,  eh  !  when  he  Was  awake  and  when 
he  was  asleep,  his  religion  was  a  part  of  him.  He  Was 
a  good  little  fellow.  I  tell  you  I  Wanted  to  be  like  him.” 
I  do  not  think  I  ever  heard  genuine  affection  and  admir¬ 
ation  ring  in  a  man’s  tone  more  heartily  than  they  did 
in  his,  and  constantly  he  came  back  to  the  same  words. 
“Eh  !  he  was  a  good  little  fellow.  I  wanted  to  be  like 
him.”  If  the  “good  little  fellow”  has  never  done  any¬ 
thing  else  in  life  has  his  religion  been  in  vain,  or  his  time 
here  on  earth  been  wasted  ?  He  has  shewn  to  another 
the  beauty  of  true  goodness  and,  by  no  gifts  or  graces  of 
his  own  but  by  the  compelling  power  of  holiness,  drawn 
a  soul  to  God.  No  bad  life's  work,  surely,  though  he 
were  killed  the  day  after. 

So  then  if  We  Would  keep  our  religion  fresh  and  living, 
and  just  because  it  is  living,  also  growing,  let  us  remember 
that  “  none  of  us  liveth  to  himself,  and  no  man  dieth 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


9 


to  himself  ”  1  and  that  though  religion  is,  and  must 
be,  the  most  intensely  personal  thing  in  the  World,  yet 
it  is  never  merely  personal.  It  has  been  truly  and 
beautifully  said  “  We  are  saved,  that  We  may  serve/’ 
Let  us  pray  to  God,  this  Lent,  to  give  us  a  deeper  sense 
of  both  sides  of  this  truth.  We  must  look  to  the  Lord 
and  be  saved,  for  we  must  not  presume  to  try  to  do  good 
Without  trying  to  be  good.  Yet  in  every  effort  after 
holiness  we  must  remember  that  we,  if  we  are  to  be  like 
our  Master,  must  seek  holiness  as  a  means  to  an  end,  not 
as  an  end  in  itself,  and  that  end  must  be  a  twofold  one, 
namely  the  glory  of  God  and  the  service  of  our  fellow 
men.  If  we  strive  to  keep  the  thought  of  these  two 
glorious  ends  always  steadily  before  us  We  shall  not 
grow  weary  nor  indifferent  in  our  religion. 


1  Rom.  xiv.  7. 


10 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


» 


CHAPTER  II 

THE  RELIGION  THAT  HAS  POWER 

In  the  first  chapter  we  noticed  two  fundamental  truths 
of  religion.  Firstly,  we  noticed  that  religion  means 
service,  and  that  even  God’s  greatest  gift,  the  gift  of 
sanctification  or  true  holiness,  is  not  given  us  to  be  kept 
but  to  be  used,  not  to  be  hoarded  for  our  own  profit 
but  to  be  spent  for  the  benefit  of  others.  And  secondly, 
we  noticed  that  holiness  is  a  thing  we  cannot  do  without, 
since  it  has  more  power  with  men  than  Wealth,  or  station, 
or  brains,  or  charm  of  manner,  or  anything  else. 

And  a  very  little  thought  will  convince  us  of  the 
absolute  truth  of  both  of  these  things.  Indeed  once 
clearly  seen  they  are  recognised  as  self-evident,  and 
needing  no  proof.  All  man's  gifts  and  graces  and  powers 
are  his  to  be  poured  out  in  the  service  of  others.  When 
We  allow  ourselves  to  forget  “  the  words  of  the  Lord  Jesus, 
how  He  said  It  is  more  blessed  to  give  than  to  receive,” 1 
We  forget  the  real  true  essential  nature  of  man.  Christ’s 
words  are  no  strange  eastern  paradox  but  a  quite  plain, 
simple,  homely  statement  of  an  obvious  truth  about 
human  nature  which  anyone  can  verify  for  himself.  The 
old  woman  in  my  parish  who,  just  before  she  died  at  the 
age  of  seventy-six,  said  to  me  “  There’s  one  thing  one 


1  Acts  xx.  35. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


ii 


never  grows  tired  of,  and  that's  doing  things  for  other 
folk.  And  there’s  one  thing  one  never  has  enough  of, 
and  that’s  making  other  folk  happy,”  had  proved  this 
truth  for  herself.  And  the  amazing  response  of  boys,  in 
every  class  and  in  every  country,  to  the  appeal  of  the 
Scout  law  of  service,  which  bids  them  do  a  kind  act 
every  day,  proves  that  what  is  true  for  the  old  is  doubly 
true  for  generous  uncorrupted  youth.  And  the  reason 
of  all  this  lies,  as  I  have  said,  deep  in  the  very  nature  of 
man.  For  We  are  made  in  the  image  of  God,  and  what 
He  is  we  are  to  become.  But  God  is  ever  a  Giver, 
not  a  Receiver.  His  joy  is  to  pour  Himself  out  in 
blessing  on  His  creatures.  So  too  man,  if  he  desires  to 
be  true  to  his  own  nature,  and  to  know  happiness, 
must  live  “  as  one  that  serveth.” 1  For  the  man  who  is 
not  spending  and  being  spent  in  the  service  of  others 
is  like  a  sun  which  is  not  pouring  out  light  and  Warmth, 
or  like  a  fountain  not  pouring  out  Water.  And  so  he  is 
restless  and  miserable,  for  any  organism  Which  is  not 
working  properly,  Which  is  not,  as  a  doctor  Would 
say,  *  ‘  functioning  properly  ”  is  a  cause  of  discomfort, 
pain,  and  at  last  death.  But  many  people  who  recognise 
this  with  respect  to  most  things,  and  quite  clearly  realize 
that  the  selfish  man  is  the  miserable  man,  forget  it  with 
respect  to  religion.  Yet  it  Would  not  be  too  much  to  say 
that  most  of  the  disappointment  and  disillusionment  in 
religion  felt  by  those  who  are  really  trying  to  serve  God, 
as  well  as  most  of  the  impatience  With,  and  contempt  for, 
religion  felt  by  worldly  and  careless  men  and  women,  are 
due  to  so  many  of  the  Master’s  disciples  having  failed 
to  lay  to  heart  His  words  "For  their  sakes  therefore  I 


1  S.  Luke  xxii.  27. 


12 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


sanctify  Myself/’1  Try  earnestly  to  be  holy;  seek 
sanctification  of  body,  mind,  and  soul ;  it  is  the  highest 
and  noblest  endeavour  man  can  set  before  him,  and  indeed 
represents  that  for  which  man  is  in  the  world,  the 
true  end  and  object  of  his  being.  But  While  you  seek 
it  for  yourself  remember  to  seek  it  always  for  the  sake 
of  others. 

But  if  our  first  thought,  namely  that  holiness,  like 
everything  else,  is  given  to  man  to  be  used  in  the  service 
of  others,  is  seen  to  be  quite  obvious  when  we  consider 
it  carefully,  and  is  recognised  as  having  its  roots  deep 
in  the  essential  nature  of  man,  the  second  thought, 
namely  that  nothing  has  such  attractive  power  with 
others  as  true  goodness,  will  be  seen  to  be  equally 
self-evident,  and  equally  rooted  and  grounded  in  man’s 
essential  nature.  For  goodness  is  godliness  or  true 
likeness  to  God,  and  holiness  is  conformity  to  the  pattern 
of  God,  Who  is  Holy.  But  What  should  man  desire 
but  likeness  to  God,  or  what  should  attract  him  except 
godliness  ?  It  is  what  he  Was  made  for.  It  is  his  true 
nature.  It  is  really  as  natural  to  him  as  water  to  a 
fish,  or  air  to  a  bird.  All  the  great  masters  of  religion 
have  known  and  taught  this  truth,  and  I  once  heard  it 
beautifully  expressed  by  a  preacher  who  said  “  There  is 
nothing  so  native  to  man  as  God,  nor  anywhere  where 
he  is  so  completely  at  home.”  It  is  of  course  true  that 
man  can  so  forsake  his  true  nature,  and  can  so  corrupt 
his  tastes  and  faculties,  that  goodness  may  become 
hateful  to  him,  and  he  may  fall  to  what  Clarendon, 
the  historian,  calls  “  an  impudent  delight  in  wickedness.” 
And  it  is  also  true,  of  course,  that  every  time  We  sin 


1  S.  John  xvii.  19. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


13 


voluntarily  we  weaken  our  power  to  recognise  the  beauty 
of  holiness,  or  to  desire  it  when  We  see  it.  But  this  is 
the  corruption  of  our  true  nature.  Naturally  man  is 
drawn  to  holiness  as  iron  is  attracted  to  a  magnet,  and  it 
is  absolutely  true  that 

“  We  needs  must  love  the  highest  when  we  see  it.” 
It  is  worth  While  laying  stress  on  this  ;  it  is  Worth  While 
thinking  often  about  it  ourselves,  and  trying  to  bring  it 
often  before  other  people,  for  the  ordinary  man  too 
often  speaks  and  thinks  of  religion  as  if  it  were  some¬ 
thing  strange  and  unnatural,  and  even  as  if  a  religious 
man  Was  less  truly  manly  than  one  who  neglects  his 
God.  Whereas  of  course  the  exact  opposite  is  true. 
A  man  or  Woman  whose  soul  is  unawakened  and  whose 
spiritual  powers  are  undeveloped,  who  cannot  pray 
or  worship,  or  know  the  joy  of  communion  with  God,  is 
a  man  or  woman  the  best  part  of  whose  nature  is  wanting. 
No  matter  how  Well  built  and  finely  developed  in  body 
a  boy  may  be,  yet  if  his  mind  is  entirely  undeveloped 
and  atrophied,  you  Would  say  of  him  “  Oh  !  poor  fellow, 
he’s  not  all  there.”  With  even  greater  truth  it  may  be 
said  of  the  man  whose  soul  has  been  neglected,  and  left 
untrained  and  unexercised,  that  he  is  not  all  there.  The 
best  part  of  him  is  lacking.  For  Christ  Jesus,  the 
Man  perfectly  submitted  to  His  Heavenly  Father’s  will, 
is  “  the  Truth,”  the  pattern,  type,  and  example  that  is 
to  say,  of  what  man  is  meant  to  be.  Hence  the  attractive 
power  of  holiness.  Just  as  perfect  health  and  wholeness 
in  a  living  creature,  whether  animal  or  human  being, 
attracts  us,  or  perfect  beauty  in  any  work  of  art,  or 
perfect  truth  and  aptness  in  a  work  of  science  or  of 
philosophy,  so  real  godliness  in  a  human  character  draws 


14 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


and  attracts  us.  For  what  health  is  to  the  body, 
or  beauty  to  the  work  of  art,  or  truth  to  the  scientific 
statement,  so  holiness  is  to  the  entire  man.  It  is  his 
true  nature,  his  perfection,  his  ideal  state  and  end.  How 
truly  says  the  prophet.  “  Ten  men  shall  take  hold  out 
of  all  languages  of  the  nations,  even  shall  take  hold  of 
the  skirt  of  him  that  is  a  Jew,  ( i.e .  the  man  who  has  first¬ 
hand  knowledge  of  God)  saying  We  will  go  with  you  : 
for  We  have  heard  that  God  is  with  you.”  1  For  there  is 
no  attraction  like  the  attraction  of  true  godliness. 

If  then  our  religion  is  real  it  should  be  something 
which  evidently  concerns  and  influences  others  besides 
ourselves.  And  it  should  draw  others  to  God.  It  is 
not  to  the  worker  in  the  mission  field  abroad  to  whom 
alone  the  words  are  spoken  “Go  ye  into  all  the  world, 
and  preach  the  gospel  to  every  creature/’  No  !  nor 
only  to  clergy  and  church  Workers  at  home.  In  all 
the  World,  everywhere  where  there  is  a  disciple  of  Jesus 
Christ,  there  should  be  a  centre  of  evangelisation,  some¬ 
one  Who  by  life  and  example  always,  and  by  kind  and 
gentle  yet  at  the  same  time  bold  and  fearless  Words 
when  occasion  serves,  is  preaching  the  gospel,  making 
disciples,  and  extending  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven. 
Quite  clearly  all  this  is  involved  not  merely  in  our 
baptismal  promise  to  be  Christ’s  faithful  soldiers  and 
servants  unto  our  lives’  ends,  but  by  the  very  nature  of 
Christianity,  and  the  very  constitution  of  Christ’s 
Kingdom.  If  then  We  are  doing  nothing  to  advance 
that  Kingdom,  if  we  are  drawing  no  one  nearer  to  God, 
our  religion  is  a  failure.  And  we  must  remember  that 
no  man’s  religion  can  be  a  success  for  himself  if  it  is  a 

1  £achariah  viii.  23. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


15 

failure  for  others.  Are  We  then  doing  anything  for 
others  ?  This  is  a  point  worth  thinking  about. 

But  do  not  let  us  make  the  mistake  of  judging  our¬ 
selves  too  hardly  or  too  hastily.  The  truth  is  what  We 
Want,  and  it  is  often  quite  as  dangerous  to  give  Way 
unduly  to  depression  and  despair  as  it  is  to  indulge 
in  conceit  and  self-satisfaction.  It  happens  to  all  of  us, 
at  times,  to  fall  into  the  mood  in  which  the  prophet 
Elijah  asked  of  God  that  he  might  die,  and  said  “  It  is 
enough  ;  now,  O  Lord,  take  away  my  life  ;  for  I  am 
not  better  than  my  fathers."1  Indeed  it  is  so  common 
that  a  friend  of  mine,  a  master  in  spiritual  things  and 
one  who  has  helped  many,  often  speaks  of  what  he 
calls  “  the  juniper  tree  feeling  "  and  warns  people 
against  it.  And  We  shall  do  Well  to  be  on  our  guard 
against  giving  Way  to  passing  fits  of  depression.  I  had 
a  very  striking  example  of  their  danger  soon  after  the 
Armistice.  A  voluntary  church  Worker,  whom  I 
will  call  Miss  A,  who  for  many  years  has  done  splendid 
work  as  a  Sunday  School  teacher,  a  temperance  and 
Band  of  Hope  worker,  and  a  Worker  with  girls,  came 
to  me  to  say  that  she  had  decided  to  give  up  all  her 
voluntary  work.  “  I  myself  fail  so  constantly,"  she 
said,  “  that  I  am  ashamed  to  go  on  pretending  to  lead 
and  help  others.  And  besides  I  really  effect  nothing. 
I  can’t  see  that  I  am  doing  any  good."  I  persuaded 
her  to  reconsider  her  decision,  assuring  her  that  she  was 
only  suffering  from  the  depression  which  was  so  Wide¬ 
spread  at  the  time,  and  which  was  so  natural  a  result  of 
the  long-draWn-out  strain  of  the  War.  Within  a  few 
days  two  girls,  speaking  of  the  difficulties  and  tempta- 


1  1  Kings  xix.  4. 


i6 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


tions  of  the  place  where  they  worked,  said  “  Of  course 
we  are  lucky.  We  work  in  the  same  room  as  Miss  A, 
and  she’s  different.  All  the  girls  feel  it.”  If  We  are 
really  sure  that  we  desire  to  be  “  faithful  soldiers  and 
servants  ’  ’  of  our  Saviour  We  must  not  be  downhearted 
if  at  times  We  seem  to  effect  little.  We  may  lay  to 
heart  the  words  of  the  psalmist  “  Heaviness  may  endure 
for  a  night,  but  joy  cometh  in  the  morning  ” 1  And  We 
may  remember  another  thing :  we  cannot  always 
enjoy  the  pleasures  of  religion,  but  we  can  always  do 
our  best  in  the  service  of  God  and  our  fellow  men. 

We  cannot  kindle  when  we  will 
The  fire  that  in  the  heart  resides, 

The  spirit  bloweth  and  is  still, 

In  mystery  our  soul  abides  : 

But  tasks  in  hours  of  insight  will’d 
Can  be  through  hours  of  gloom  fulfill’d.2 

But  while  we  refuse  to  allow  ourselves  to  give  way  to 
depression  where  our  conscience  tells  us  that  we  are 
really,  by  God’s  grace,  doing  our  best,  we  must  not 
refuse  to  recognise  unpleasant  truths  where  there 
is  real  cause  for  dissatisfaction.  If  we  feel  that  our 
religion  really  has  little  power  in  our  own  lives  (and  it 
is  its  effect  in  our  own  lives  that  we  can  best  judge  of, 
and  which  is  the  safest  test  of  its  real  value)  we  may  be 
sure  that  it  has  little  in  the  lives  of  others.  And  we 
must  then  boldly  face  the  question  as  to  why  it  is  so 

Is  it  because  ours  is  not  a  real,  vital,  living  religion 
at  all  ?  Everyone  must  begin  with  what  I  may  call  a 
second-hand  religion  ;  a  religion  that  says  “  We  have 
heard  with  ears,  and  our  fathers  have  declared  unto  us, 

1  Ps.  xxx.  5.  2  “  Morality  ”  by  Matthew  Arnold. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


*7 


the  noble  works  that  Thou  didst  in  their  days,  and  in  the 
old  time  before  them.”  In  religion,  as  in  everything 
else,  young  people  must  be  content  to  take  things  at 
second-hand  on  the  authority  of  those  older  and  wiser 
than  themselves,  till  they  can  prove  them  for  themselves. 
I  have  seen  scores,  I  might  say  hundreds,  of  young  people 
whose  religion  at  first  has  been  second-hand,  derived 
from  me,  or  from  their  mothers,  or  from  some  other 
friend,  but  who,  by  steady  perseverance,  and  waiting 
upon  God,  have  come  to  a  strong  and  vital  religion  of 
their  own.  But  not  till  We  have  real  religious  experience, 
real  first-hand  knowledge  of  God,  will  our  religion  have 
much  power  in  our  own  lives,  or  any  power  at  all  in  the 
fives  of  others.  Not  unless  We  “  speak  that  We  do  know 
and  testify  that  we  have  seen  ”  will  people  be  likely 
to  receive  our  witness.  For  men  and  women  are  quick 
to  recognise  true  religion  when  they  meet  it.  I  Was 
once  speaking  to  an  old  bed-ridden  woman  about  a 
new  curate  who  had  come  to  take  the  place  of  one  who 
had  been  in  the  habit  of  visiting  her,  but  had  left  to  go 
to  other  Work.  The  former  curate  had  visited  her  for 
some  years  ;  the  new  one  only  for  a  Week  or  two,  yet 
she  said  “  Mr.  A  Was  a  nice  young  gentleman.  I’m 
sure  he  Was  good  and  in  earnest,  and  I  pray  for  him  in 
his  new  Work.  But  the  new  young  gentleman  is  different. 
He  has  saving  experience.  You  can  tell  that  he  knows 
his  Lord.”  The  old  Woman  Was  right.  The  first  curate 
was  a  good  earnest  and  sincere  man  who  has  since,  I 
believe,  developed  into  a  real  pastor  of  souls.  But  his 
successor  Was  a  man  who  had  known  bodily  suffering, 
and  spiritual  struggle,  and  had  to  fight  for  his  faith, 
and,  going  down  into  the  vale  of  misery,  had  learned  to 


c 


i8 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


know  the  power  of  grace.  He  had,  as  the  old  Woman 
recognised,  ‘  saving  experience/  Now  here,  it  Would 
appear,  we  touch  a  vital  question.  We  all  have  to 
begin,  in  religion  as  in  everything  else,  by  learning  from 
those  who  have  gone  before  us,  from  those  older  and 
wiser  than  we  are,  whom  God  has  given  to  be  our 
“  governors,  teachers,  spiritual  pastors  and  masters/’ 
But  this  second-hand  religion,  though  a  necesssary 
preparation  for  a  vital  religion  of  our  own,  is  only  a 
preparation.  It  has  little  power  in  our  owm  lives  ;  it 
has  no  power  at  all  to  help  or  inspire  others.  I  cannot 
doubt  that  much  of  the  failure  of  the  church  to-day, 
and  indeed  in  every  age  since  the  days  of  the  great 
persecutions,  is  that  many  people  who  are  supposed  to 
be,  and  who  believe  themselves  to  be,  really  religious 
have  no  vital  religious  experience  of  their  own.  They 
know  about  God,  but  they  do  not  know  God.  But  if 
we  are  in  earnest  about  our  religion,  if  we  believe  that 
to  have  a  vital  religion  of  one’s  owm  is  the  greatest  blessing 
in  life,  and  to  pass  it  on  to  others  is  the  greatest  service 
we  can  do  to  the  world  we  shall  seriously  enquire,  and 
earnestly  ask  God  to  teach  us,  what  answer  we  ought 
to  give  to  the  question  "  Is  my  religion  my  very  own  ? 
Is  it  firmly  based  on  experience  ?  ” 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


19 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  KNOWLEDGE  OF  GOD 

It  is  possible  that  some  of  my  readers  may  have  been 
depressed  by  the  last  chapter,  and  that  others  may  have 
doubted  its  wisdom.  Some  may  have  anxiously  asked 
themselves  “  Have  I,  perhaps,  no  vital  religion  at  all  ? 
Have  I  been  deceiving  myself  all  the  time  ?  ”  Others 
may  have  been  thinking  “  What  is  the  good  of  disturbing 
people’s  minds  with  such  questions  ?  Will  they  not 
drive  many  humble  and  simple  minded  people  into 
nervous  doubts  and  questionings,  and  even  into  despair, 
while  encouraging  the  self-confident  and  presumptuous 
to  relie  on  religious  experiences  which  may  be  mere 
delusions  ?  ” 

I  would  not  deny  that  there  are  such  dangers  con¬ 
nected  with  the  thoughts  suggested  in  the  last  chapter. 
But  then  religion  is  a  dangerous  thing.  Do  not  be 
surprised  at  such  a  statement.  There  is  nothing  to  be 
had  in  this  life  which  is  worth  the  gaining  which  can  be 
had  without  danger.  Life  itself  is  dangerous,  a  perilous 
adventure,  and  religion,  which  is  the  highest  life  of  the 
entire  man,  has  been  well  described  as  the  supreme 
adventure.  And  since  there  is  nothing  that  the  world 
needs  to-day  so  much  as  true  religion — all  great  states¬ 
men,  and  thinkers,  and  prophets  are  agreed  that  we 
shall  not  rebuild  England  and  Europe  and  the  whole 


20 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


world  without  what  they  call  "  spiritual  sanctions  ” — 
we  must  not  allow  ourselves  to  shrink  from  the  task  of 
making  sure  that  our  religion  is  securely  based.  What 
would  our  generals  have  done  if,  when  they  realized 
the  war  was  unavoidable,  they  had  had  any,  even  the 
slightest,  reason  to  fear  that  their  guns  were  of  an 
obsolete  pattern,  or  their  high  explosives  untrustworthy? 
They  would  have  left  no  stone  unturned  till  either  the 
fear  was  proved  groundless,  or  the  mistake  remedied. 
So  with  the  Church  Militant.  She  must  be  assured 
that  her  armour  is  of  the  right  kind,  the  armour  of  God. 

But  indeed  we  need  not  fear,  if  only  we  are  in  earnest. 
True  religion  is  the  knowledge  and  love  of  God.  And 
whatever  else  our  Heavenly  Father,  in  His  infinite 
wisdom  and  love,  may  grant  or  withhold  in  answrer 
to  our  prayers,  there  is  one  thing  He  will  never  deny 
to  those  who  deligently  seek  it,  and  that  is  the  knowledge 
of  Himself.  Indeed  He  has  definitely  and  expressly 
promised  it.  "  For  they  shall  all  know  Me,  from  the 
least  of  them  unto  the  greatest  of  them,  saith  the 
Lord.”  1  And  our  Blessed  Lord  confirms  this  promise 
for  He  said  “  I  am  come  that  they  might  have  life,  and 
that  they  might  have  it  more  abundantly/ 1 2  And  again 
“  And  this  is  life  eternal,  that  they  might  know  Thee, 
the  only  true  God,  and  Jesus  Christ  Whom  Thou  hast 
sent.” 3  So  then  we  may  be  confident  that  if  we  truly 
desire  this  knowledge  of  God  which  He  Himself  has 
promised,  and  which  is  truly  our  life,  fife  eternal,  we 
shall  not  be  left  lacking  it,  provided  we  are  prepared 
to  pay  the  price .  I  say  again,  provided  we  are  prepared 

1  Jeremiah  xxxi.  34. 

2  S.  John  x.  10.  3  S.  John  xvii.  3. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


21 


to  pay  the  price,  for  many  people,  who  would  be  the 
first  to  admit  that  the  world’s  prizes  are  only  to  be  gained 
at  the  cost  of  earnest  endeavour,  and  that  no  man  gains 
fame,  or  knowledge,  or  wealth,  or  success  in  the  arts  or 
sciences,  without  strenuous  effort,  seem  to  think  that 
their  religion  should  cost  them  nothing.  They  need  to 
be  reminded  of  our  Lord’s  words  that  “  strait  is  the  gate 
and  narrow  is  the  way  that  leadeth  unto  life,  and  few 
there  be  that  find  it.” 1  The  man  who  found  the 
treasure  hid  in  the  field,  the  merchant  man  who  found 
the  pearl  of  great  price,  each  is  represented  to  us,  by 
our  Blessed  Lord,  as  selling  all  that  he  had 2  to  buy 
the  treasure  that  his  heart  desired.  We  may  not  be 
asked  by  God  to  give  up  all  that  we  have — though  again 
we  may  be — but  one  thing  is  certain,  namely  that  a 
religion  which  costs  nothing  is  worth  what  it  costs. 
And  it  is  just  those  whose  religion  has  cost  them  most 
who  are  the  first  to  say  that  it  is  worth  all,  and  more 
than  all,  that  they  have  paid  for  it.  I  have  a  friend 
who  was  once  a  prosperous  business  man,  with  a  wife, 
two  children,  health,  and  prospects.  To-day  his  wife 
and  children  are  dead,  his  business  gone  and  he,  a  broken 
man,  working  for  a  small  wage,  hops  the  world  on  one 
leg  and  a  crutch.  What  does  he  say  of  the  way  God 
has  treated  him  ?  He  says  “  I  never  knew  how  good 
God  was  till  He  took  away  everything  else.”  I  do  not 
say  that  all,  or  indeed  most,  have  to  go  through  so  much 
in  order  to  earn  a  true  religion.  I  know  that  it  is  not  so. 
God,  like  a  wise  gardener,  knows  that  some  plants  do 
best  in  the  sunshine,  some  in  the  shade,  that  some  can 
stand,  and  need,  pruning  with  a  heavy  hand  while 

1  S.  Matt.  vii.  14.  2  S.  Matt.  xiii.  44-46. 


22 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


others  may  be  lightly  treated,  and  He  deals  with  each 
as  is  best  for  each,  and  asks  of  no  one  of  us  one  single 
pang  more  than  is  for  his  good.  And  happy  indeed  is 
that  soul  which  is  so  trustful  of  our  Heavenly  Father, 
so  surrendered  to  His  Will,  that  little  or  no  discipline  is 
needed  for  its  perfection.  But  whether  in  joy,  and  in  the 
brightness  of  His  countenance,  or  in  sorrow  and  suffering, 
and  through  the  valley  of  the  shadow,  the  lesson  must  be 
learned,  and  the  prize  striven  for,  and  earned.  No  man 
stumbles  by  accident  into  a  true  religion,  or  strolls 
into  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  For  if  it  is  true  that  God 
longs  to  make  Himself  known  to  all  His  children,  it  is 
equally  true  that  “  Verily  Thou  art  a  God  that  hidest 
Thyself,  O  God  of  Israel,  the  Saviour.” 1  He  is  a 
rewarder  of  those  who  diligently  seek  Him.2  Much  of 
the  failure  of  religion  to-day  is  due  to  a  low,  unworthy, 
irreverent  conception  of  its  claims  and  its  cost.  Our 
religion,  at  least  as  far  as  we  ourselves  are  concerned, 
lacks  sterness,  austerity,  reverence  and  the  spirit  of 
sacrifice. 

Remembering  then  that  a  true  religion,  the  really 
intimate  and  personal  knowledge  of  God,  will  not  be 
gained  without  effort,  nor  bought  save  at  a  great  price, 
let  us  try  to  see  how  men  come  to  a  true  religion.  And 
here  we  do  well  to  remember  that  no  two  men  come  to 
God  along  exactly  the  same  path.  It  has  been  beauti¬ 
fully  said  “  There  are  as  many  paths  to  the  feet  of  God 
as  there  are  souls  to  tread  those  paths.”  So  the  religious 
experience  of  one  soul  will  never  be  exactly  the  same  as 
that  of  another  just  because  no  two  souls  are  ever 
exactly  alike.  Many  years  ago  I  was  disputing,  in  the 

1  Isaiah  xlv.  15.  2  Heb.  xi.  6. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


23 


Town  Hall  Square,  in  Leeds,  with  a  street  orator.  Sud¬ 
denly  he  exclaimed  “To  hear  you  speak  anyone  would 
think  that  you  did  not  believe  that  all  men  are  born 
equal.”  “  All  men  bom  equal  !  ”  I  exclaimed.  “  God 
forbid  I  should  believe  such  desolating  nonsense.  No 
two  men  are  born  equal.  God  never  made  a  man  like 
me  before  since  the  world  began,  and  will  never  make 
another  as  long  as  the  world  lasts.  Nor  one  like  my 
friend  the  speaker  either.  That  is  what  gives  value  to 
souls.  Every  one  is  unique/’  This  of  course  is  true. 
If  all  souls  were  alike,  or  even  if  all  were  made  after  a 
few  patterns,  then  the  loss  of  a  few  out  of  so  many  million 
would  be  of  no  more  importance  than  the  loss  of  a  few 
grains  of  com  out  of  10  million  bushels.  But  if  each 
soul  is  unique,  unlike  any  other,  the  work  of  a  supreme 
creative  Artist  who  never  repeats  His  designs  nor 
duplicates  a  pattern,  then  each  soul  is  of  infinite  value, 
and  if  lost  can  never  be  replaced.  And  if  each  soul  is 
thus  unique,  like  other  souls  in  many  ways  no  doubt 
yet  also  in  some  real  way  unlike  any  other  soul,  then 
its  experience  will  be  different  too.  Yet  religious 
experience  falls  into  certain  great,  broadly  marked 
classes.  And  it  is  a  real  help  to  try  and  distinguish 
the  various  types  of  religious  experience,  and  to  seek 
to  understand  to  which  type  our  own  religious  experience, 
or  that  of  our  friends,  belongs.  For  by  so  recognising 
different  types  of  religious  experience  we  shall  be  pro¬ 
tected  against  two  dangers,  namely  those  of  arrogance 
and  of  depression. 

Many  people  who  have  had  some  very  vivid  experience 
are  inclined  to  think  that  anyone  who  has  not  come 
to  God  exactly  along  the  same  lines  cannot  know  Him 


24 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


at  all.  They  are  tempted,  that  is  to  say,  arrogantly 
to  deny  all  religious  experience  but  their  own.  Some 
time  ago  I  had  been  preaching  out  for  a  friend,  and 
in  the  train  back  found  myself  next  one  of  the  congre¬ 
gation  I  had  just  been  addressing.  He  described,  with 
deep  feeling  and  obvious  sincerity,  his  own  conversion 
and  what  he  described  as  his  “New  Birth/’  I  think 
the  language  he  used  was  theologically  incorrect,  and 
what  he  called  “  regeneration  ’’  should  have  been  called 
“  conversion.’’  But  I  am  sure  he  described  a  real,  and 
deeply  blessed,  religious  experience,  and  differences  of 
theological  terminology  are  not  important  in  such  cases. 
As  he  got  out  of  the  train  he  pressed  my  hand  and  said 
“  I  shall  pray  that  some  day  you  too  may  come  to  know 
the  Lord”  Five  and  twenty  years  ago  I  should  have 
been  angry  at  what  would  have  seemed  to  me  an  uncalled 
for  imper finance.  But  now  I  think  I  understand  the 
man,  and  “  to  understand  all,  is  to  forgive  all.”  The 
man’s  own  religious  experience  was  so  vivid,  and  so 
satisfying,  that  he  could  not  imagine  any  other,  or  that 
anyone  who  had  not  had  one  exactly  the  same  could 
have  had  anything  of  real  value  at  all.  But  surely  he 
lost  a  good  deal  in  sympathetic  understanding  of  what 
Juliana  of  Norwich  would  have  called  “  his  even 
Christians,”  and  in  grateful  recognition  of  the  infinite 
variety  of  God’s  working  with  souls. 

But  just  as  a  failure  to  recognise  the  truth  that  souls 
come  to  the  knowledge  of  God  along  many  different 
paths  leads  some  to  undue  arrogance,  so  it  leads  others 
to  unnecessa^  depression.  Simple  self-distrusting  men 
and  women  hear  someone  speaking  of  his  spiritual 
experiences  and  ask  themselves  “  Why  have  I  never 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


25 


felt  and  experienced  anything  like  this  man  ?  Is  he 
deceiving  himself,  or  is  there  something  seriously 
lacking  in  me  and  in  my  religion  ?  ”  If  they  recognised 
the  infinite  variety  of  the  ways  in  which  God  draws  souls 
to  Himself  they  might  recognise  that  their  own  know¬ 
ledge  of  God  is  as  real,  and  as  securely  based,  as 
that  of  the  speaker  whose  account  of  his  conversion  now 
depresses  them. 

What  then  are  the  chief  outstanding  types  of  religious 
experience  ?  Without  trying  to  make  an  exhaustive 
analysis  I  think  we  may  recognise  a  few.  First  there 
are  direct  experiences  of  the  soul  in  the  shape  of  visions, 
voices,  and  similar  things.  No  doubt  these  are  excep¬ 
tional,  but  they  are  nothing  like  as  rare  as  people 
suppose.  Indeed  I  have  seldom  spoken  in  public, 
whether  in  a  sermon  or  in  any  other  way,  upon  the 
subject  of  religious  experiences  without  hearing  after¬ 
wards,  from  some  of  my  audience  who  wished  to  tell 
me  of  what  they  had  themselves  experienced.  No  doubt 
some  were  cases  of  self-delusion  and  hysteria,  but  not 
all.  Many  have  borne  on  them  the  stamp  of  reality. 
Much  of  the  sense  of  unreality  with  which,  too  often, 
people  read  their  Bibles  is  due  to  the  fact  that  while 
they  think  they  believe  in  miracles  as  having  happened 
in  Syria  in  the  first  century,  they  would  never  believe 
that  the  same  kind  of  thing  could  happen  in  London 
or  Manchester  in  the  twentieth  century.  If,  however, 
we  could  all  conquer  our  British  shyness  and  speak 
freely  to  one  another  of  religious  matters,  saying,  in 
no  spirit  of  boastfulness  or  vain-glory,  but  with  a  single 
eye  to  mutual  encouragement  and  help,  “  O  come 
hither,  and  harken,  all  ye  that  fear  God,  and  I  will 


26 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


tell  you  what  He  hath  done  for  ray  soul/' 1  we  should 
learn  how  true  it  is  that  the  experience  of  the  servants 
of  God  has  been  the  same  in  every  age,  and  that  there  is 
nothing  in  Holy  Scripture,  except  the  greatest  miracles 
of  our  Blessed  Lord  Himself,  which  cannot  be  paralleled 
in  the  present  day,  and  in  every  age.  But  we  need  to 
remember  firstly  that  in  every  age  those  who  have 
enjoyed  the  special  and  miraculous  experiences  have  been 
the  small  minority,  and  secondly  that  the  persons  who 
enjoy  them  are  not  necessarily  the  most  favoured.  A 
man  is  not  to  be  accounted  more  holy,  more  religious, 
more  truly  spiritual  because  h*  has  had  such  experiences, 
nor  less  so  because  he  has  not.  Rightly  used  such 
things  are,  like  all  else  that  God  sends,  a  blessing ; 
misused  they  can  be  a  terrible  danger  and  snare.  But 
they  are  real,  and  when  we  meet  them,  in  our  own  lives 
or  the  lives  of  others,  we  ought  to  recognise  them  as  part 
of  the  material  of  which  religion  is  made. 

More  common,  and — if  one  may  venture  to  say  so, 
where  one  is  comparing  one  method  by  which  God  works 
with  another — more  safe  is  what  we  may  call  moral 
experience.  It  may  be  the  experience,  so  common  in 
what  are  called  ‘  instantaneous  '  conversions,  of  God 
coming  into  a  restless,  unhappy,  distracted  life  and 
bringing  power,  joy,  and  unity  of  purpose.  Such 
surely  is  the  experience  expressed  in  the  well-known 
lines  of  Doddridge's  hymn  “  0  happy  day  " 

Now  rest  my  long-divided  heart. 

Fixed  on  this  blissful  centre,  rest ; 

Nor  ever  from  my  Lord  depart, 

With  Him  of  every  good  possessed. 

1  Ps.  lxvi.  14. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


27 


Or  again  it  may  be  the  growing  realization  of  the  fact 
that  “  the  pure  in  heart  shall  see  God  ’’  and  that  a  good 
life  is  in  itself  an  experience  of  God.  For  if  it  is  true, 
as  St.  John  says,  that  “  When  He  shall  appear,  we  shall 
be  like  Him  ;  for  we  shall  see  Him  as  He  is  ”  1  it  is 
equally  true  that  when  we  are  like  Him  He  shall  appear , 
for,  according  to  the  old  mystical  doctrine,  “  Only  like 
can  know  like,"  and  we  know  God  just  to  the  extent 
that  we  are  holy,  godly,  god-like.  And  so  a  steady  effort 
after  a  good  life  is  the  broad  highway  to  the  knowledge 
of  God.  If  we  call  the  knowledge  of  God  which  comes 
by  visions  and  revelations  mystical  experience  of  God, 
then  we  may  call  the  knowledge  which  comes  through 
delivery  from  the  bondage  of  sin,  and  daily  effort  after 
holiness,  by  the  name  of  moral  experience  of  God. 

And  then  we  may  go  on  to  recognise  a  third  type 
of  experience  of  God  which  I  would  call  practical 
experience  of  God.  It  comes  from  a  constantly  growing 
sense  of  God’s  guiding  and  protecting  hand  in  daily 
life,  whether  in  one’s  own  life,  or  that  of  others,  or  in 
the  course  of  history,  and  is  a  very  real  path  to  God. 
But  we  must  consider  religious  experience,  and  its 
identity  in  all  ages,  and  its  infinite  variety  in  different 
souls,  more  in  detail  in  the  next  chapters. 


1  1  S.  John  iii.  2. 


28 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  IV 

VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE — (i)  MYSTICAL 

In  the  last  chapter  we  distinguished  three  main  types 
of  religious  experience,  mystical,  moral,  and  practical. 
No  doubt  these  types  of  experience  shade  imperceptibly 
into  one  another  so  that  it  may  often  be  difficult  to  say, 
of  some  particular  experience,  into  which  class  we  ought 
to  put  it.  But  speaking  broadly  the  classification  will 
hold  and  will  prove  useful.  And  our  task  in  this  chapter 
will  be  to  consider  examples  of  the  first  kind.  And  such 
examples  as  we  examine  will  be  drawn,  as  far  as  possible, 
in  equal  proportion  from  the  Bible  and  from  the  ex¬ 
perience  of  living  men  and  women.  For  our  object  is  to 
display  the  identity  of  religious  experience  in  all  ages, 
and  to  shew  that  the  way  in  which  God  revealed  Himself 
to  Abraham,  Moses,  or  Isaiah  is  the  same  as  that  in 
which  He  reveals  Himself  to  men  and  women  to-day. 
For  it  is  only  the  unimportant  things,  the  outward 
things  such  as  clothes,  and  manners,  and  customs,  which 
alter  with  time.  The  great  and  vital  things,  the  eternal 
verities  of  divine  and  human  nature,  do  not  change. 
That  is  why  the  greatest  literature,  which  deals  with  the 
simple  and  profound  facts  of  God  and  man,  sin  and 
repentance,  love  and  hatred,  life  and  death,  never 
grows  old.  Some  smart  novel  of  to-day  will  seem 
utterly  out  of  date  ten  years  hence.  The  dust  lies 
thick  on  books  which  were  once  hailed  as  masterpieces 
of  insight  and  power.  But  for  the  penitent  sinner  the 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


29 


51st  Psalm  is  as  fresh  as  on  the  day  it  was  written  and 
on  the  day  of  his  conversion  any  man,  be  he  Englishman, 
Kafir,  Chinaman  or  Hindoo,  can  understand  the  12th 
Chapter  of  Isaiah.  Indeed  one  of  the  chief  objects  of 
reading  the  Bible  should  be  to  compare  and  contrast  the 
examples  of  God’s  dealings  with  souls  which  are  described 
in  it  with  the  examples  of  His  dealings  which  we  ourselves 
observe  in  daily  life.  Nothing  gives  such  interest  to 
our  Bible  study  as  the  discovery  of  something  in  the  life 
of  one  of  the  patriarchs,  prophets,  or  saints  of  which  we 
can  say  “  Why  after  all  that  is  no  different  from  what 
happened  to  so  and  so  whom  I  knew  well.”  And 
equally  nothing  so  deepens  in  us  a  sense  of  the  reality — 
the  “  objectivity  ”  if  I  may  borrow  a  word  from  philo¬ 
sophy — of  religion  as  to  find  our  own  religious  experience 
explained  and  justified  in  Holy  Scripture.  Let  us 
examine  one  or  two  typical  examples  of  mystical 
religious  experience. 

Take  the  wonderful  dialogue  between  God  and  Moses 
recorded  in  Exodus  xxxiii,  verse  12  to  the  end.  Read 
the  passage  carefully  and  you  will  notice,  in  the 
experience  described,  the  following  elements  : 

(i)  Moses,  oppressed  by  a  sense  of  his  own  weakness, 
and  of  the  magnitude  of  his  task,  cries  to  God  “  If  Thy 
presence  go  not  with  me,  carry  us  not  up  hence.”  And 
God  replies  "  My  presence  shall  go  with  thee,  and  I  will 
give  thee  rest.” 

(ii)  When  God  assures  Moses  of  His  protection  and 
help  He  says  “  Thou  hast  found  grace  in  my  sight  and 
I  know  thee  by  name.”  That  is  to  say  Moses  has 
a  deep  sense  of  God’s  knowledge  of,  and  interest  in, 
him  as  an  individual  whom  He  knows  personally. 


30 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


(iii)  Moses  asks  to  see  God's  glory,  but  God,  passing 
this  request  by  without  comment,  promises  that  all 
His  goodness  shall  be  revealed  to  him. 

(iv)  Moses,  desiring  to  see  God,  is  hidden  in  a  cleft 
in  the  rock,  shadowed  by  God’s  hand,  and  it  is  not  till 
the  hand  is  removed,  and  God  has  passed  by,  that  he 
sees  God  already  passed,  “for  My  face  shall  not  be 
seen” 

Can  we  recognise  in  these  various  elements  of  religious 
experience  anything  which  we  might  expect  to  meet 
with  to-day  ?  Surely  we  may.  Let  us  take  them  one 
by  one. 

That  man  can,  and  does,  speak  to  God,  and  hear  His 
answer,  needs  no  proof.  Saints  in  every  age  bear 
witness  to  this  experience  as  the  most  vital  in  their 
lives.  But  one  example  I  may  give.  A  young  officer 
in  the  Flying  Corps  once  said  to  me  “  I  suppose  we  all 
know  what  it  is  to  go  on  our  knees  to  pray  for  something 
we  intensely  desire,  and  to  rise  from  our  knees  quite 
content  not  to  have  it.”  Yes,  that  is  an  experience 
which  if  not  all,  at  any  rate  very  many  people,  have  had. 
But  how  would  it  be  possible  unless  the  person  who 
prayed  had  heard  God  saying  :  "  That  I  cannot  grant. 
Trust  Me  ;  it  is  better  for  you  not  to  have  it,”  or  unless 
He  had  shewed  His  child  some  better  object  of  desire  ? 
If  prayer  is  not  real  communion  with  God,  real  inter¬ 
course  involving  listening  to  His  voice  as  well  as 
speaking  to  Him,  it  is  nothing. 

And  as  there  is  no  need  to  labour  the  point  that  we  can 
both  speak  to  God  and  also  hear  Him  answering,  -o  there 
is  little  need  to  shew  by  examples  drawn  either  from 
history  or  daily  life,  that  men  seeking  to  God  in  times  of 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


3i 


anxiety  and  of  stress  do  find  Him  always  quick  to  answer 
“  My  presence  shall  go  with  thee  and  I  will  give  thee 
rest.”  When  a  friend  asked  Geneial  Gordon  if  he  were 
not  afraid  to  go  all  alone  to  China,  where  he  did  the  great 
work  which  earned  him  his  title  of  “  Chinese  Gordon,” 
he  replied,  “  But  I  am  not  going  alone.  My  Saviour 
will  go  with  me.”  And  Marshall  Foch,  insisting  on  time 
for  attendance  at  his  Mass,  in  the  most  critical  days  of 
the  war,  and  Lord  Kitchener,  turning  into  a  London 
church  for  a  short  time  for  quiet  prayer  on  his  way  daily 
to  the  War  Office,  are  examples  of  men  who,  feeling  the 
strain  and  the  burden,  cried  to  God  “  If  Thy  presence 
go  not  with  us  carry  us  not  up  hence.” 

But  what  shall  we  say  of  the  second  element  we  noted, 
of  the  sense  of  God’s  individual  knowledge  of,  and  love 
for,  the  soul  ?  Rightly  understood  this  is,  I  believe,  one 
of  the  most  fundamental  experiences  of  religion,  and 
one  of  the  most  universal.  Let  me  take  an  example. 
I  was  speaking  to  one  of  my  lads  of  the  dreadful 
experience  of  a  chaplain  whose  first  duty  in  France  was 
to  prepare  for  death  a  young  soldier  who  was  to  be  shot 
for  cowardice.  My  friend  said  “  I  can  understand  it. 
I  once  nearly  gave  way  to  panic  myself.  I’d  been  under 
bombardment  once  or  twice  myself  and  come  through 
all  right.  And  then  one  day  I  had  a  panic.  It’s  no 
good  my  trying  to  explain  to  you  what  I  felt,  for  no  one 
can  know  till  he  has  experienced  it.  And  then,  all  of 
a  sudden,  when  in  another  moment  I  should  have 
thrown  away  my  rifle  and  run,  it  passed.  Suddenly 
I  knew — no,  I  did  not  think,  you  can’t  think  at  a  time 
like  that  ;  I  just  knew — that  God  had  His  eye  on  me,  and 
that  if  I  were  blown  to  atoms  that  moment  it  would 


32 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


not  matter.  God  seemed  to  say  to  me  ‘  Out  of  all  the 
millions  fighting  on  all  the  fronts  I  have  My  eye  on  you, 
and  if  you  die  this  minute  it  won’t  matter  ;  I  shall  take 
care  of  you.’  After  that  I  often  felt  afraid,  but  I  never 
felt  in  a  panic.  I  did  not  want  to  be  hit  in  a  painful 
place,  and  I  did  not  want  to  be  a  cripple.  Above  all 
I  did  not  want  to  be  blinded.  But  I  was  never  in  a 
panic  again.”  I  asked  him  if  he  had  ever  had  the  same 
experience  again.  He  just  smiled  and  said  “  No  !  never 
again.  But  once  is  enough.  You  don’t  need  that  sort 
of  thing  often.  I  might  grow  careless  and  bad  ;  though 
I  hope  I  won’t.  But  I  could  never  say,  as  some  chaps 
do,  that  there  is  no  God.  Because  you  see  I  know 
different.” 

Surely  this  lad's  experience  was  absolutely  identical 
with  that  of  Moses.  I  say  absolutely  identical  for  under 
all  differences  of  form  and  manner  we  can  recognise  the 
identity  of  what  is  essential.  In  the  crisis  of  his  life 
the  young  soldier,  like  the  great  leader  of  God’s  chosen 
people,  heard  God  saying  “  I  know  thee  by  name  and 
thou  hast  also  found  grace  in  My  sight.”  That  is  to  say 
he  realized  God’s  interest  in  him  personally,  as  one 
individual  clearly  seen  and  known  among  all  the  other 
millions  of  God’s  children.  And  as  he  realized  God’s 
interest  in  him  personally,  so  too  he  knew  that  that 
interest  was  a  loving  interest  and  that  he,  sinful  and 
imperfect  as  he  was,  had  yet  found  grace  in  God’s  sight. 

But  are  not  these  two  elements  the  most  fundamental 
in  all  religious  experience.  Reasoning,  so  to  speak,  a 
priori ,  we  should  expect  that  if  and  when  a  man  has 
actual  first-hand  experience  of  God,  Infinite,  Omni¬ 
potent,  Holy,  his  chief  feelings  would  be  of  his  own  utter 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


33 


insignificance  in  the  eyes  of  God,  and  of  God’s  wrath 
at  his  sinfulness.  The  exact  opposite  is  the  truth.  As 
soon  as  a  man  knows  God  he  knows  Him  for  what  He  is, 
and  cries  “  Behold  the  heaven  of  heavens  cannot  contain 
thee  ” 1  and  asks  in  amazement,  as  he  realizes  God’s 
greatness  and  his  own  nothingness  “  What  is  man, 
that  Thou  art  mindful  of  him,  and  the  son  of  man  that 
Thou  visitest  him  ?  ”  2  But  over  and  above  this  feeling, 
transcending  it  and  as  it  were  swallowing  it  up,  is  a 
sense  of  his  own  value  in  the  eyes  of  God,  not  because 
of  his  own  worth  but  because  of  the  goodness  of  God, 
and  because  of  His  nature,  which  is  Love.  At  his  call 
Jeremiah  hears  God  say  “  Before  I  formed  thee  in  the 
belly  I  knew  thee,  and  before  thou  earnest  forth  out  of 
the  womb  I  sanctified  thee  ”  3  S.  Paul  knows  that  during 
the  years  before  he  met  his  Master  on  the  road  to  Damas¬ 
cus  God  had  marked  him  for  His  own  and  had  “  separated 
me  from  my  mother’s  womb  ”  4  for  his  life’s  task  of 
preaching  the  gospel.  S.  John  knows  that  God’s 
intimate  and  personal  love  for  us  is  earlier  than  our  love 
for  Him  and  the  cause  of  it,  “  we  love  Him  because  he 
first  loved  us.” 5  And  we  all  know,  and  must  surelv 
love,  the  supreme  expression  of  this  personal  relationship 
of  God  to  the  soul  given  in  the  139th  psalm. 

But  the  religious  experience  of  the  saints  in  all  ages 
does  not  only  witness  to  the  intimate  and  personal 
nature  of  God’s  knowledge  of  each  one  of  us.  It  wit¬ 
nesses  also  the  fact  that  God’s  interest  is  a  loving  one. 
If  it  is  true,  as  we  have  seen  that  it  is,  that  the  experience 
of  God,  instead  of  oppressing  us  with  a  sense  of  our 

1  1  Kings  viii.  27.  2  Ps.  viii.  4.  3  Jeremiah  i.  5. 

4  Gal.  i.  15.  6  1  St.  John  iv.  19. 

D 


34 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


worthlessness  and  insignificance  in  His  eyes,  lifts  us 
up  with  a  sense  that  He  knows  us  by  name,  it  is  equally 
true  that  knowing  God  we  know  Him  as  a  God  of  Love, 
not  as  One  of  wrath  and  anger.  I  would  not  deny  for 
a  moment,  rather  I  would  strongly  assert,  that  to  know 
God  is  to  learn  one’s  own  unworthiness.  When  Isaiah 
sees  God  he  cries.  “  Woe  in  me  !  for  I  am  undone  ; 
because  I  am  a  man  of  unclean  lips,  and  I  dwell  in  the 
midst  of  a  people  of  unclean  lips.”  1  Job  sees  God  and 
says  “  I  have  heard  of  Thee  by  the  hearing  of  the  ear  ; 
but  now  mine  eye  seeth  Thee.  Wherefore  I  abhor 
myself,  and  repent  in  dust  and  ashes.” 2  S.  Peter 
knows  Jesus  as  God  and  is  driven  to  his  knees,  calling 
out  “  Depart  from  me,  for  I  am  a  sinful  man,  O  Lord.”  3 
Conviction  of  sin  is  a  natural,  one  might  say  an  inevitable 
result  of  a  real  knowledge  of  God.  But  it  must  be 
noticed  that  in  all  the  passages  we  have  quoted,  and 
doubtless  in  many  other  passages  which  we  might  have 
quoted  fiom  the  Bible,  and  from  other  literature,  what  is 
expressed  in  a  sense  of  personal  sinfulness  and  un worthi¬ 
ness,  not  a  sense  of  God’s  anger  and  wrath.  Rather,  as 
we  have  seen,  this  sense  of  personal  sinfulness  is  trans¬ 
cended  and  swallowed  up  by  a  sense  of  God’s  loving 
mercy  and  favour.  If  you  really  and  truly  hear  God 
speaking  to  you  at  all  you  will  hear  Him  saying  “  Thou 
hast  found  grace  in  my  sight,”  or  even  better  still 
“  Thou  art  My  beloved  child  in  whom  I  am  well  pleased.”4 

One  of  the  earliest  pieces  of  religious  experience  ever 
brought  to  my  notice  illustrates  this.  When  I  was  at 
Cambridge  a  working  lad  in  my  Bible  Class  told  me  how, 


1  Isaiah  vi.  5. 

3  8.  Luke  v.  8. 


2  Job.  xlii.  6. 

4  S.  Matt  iii.  17. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


35 


when  he  was  about  sixteen  and  a  half,  he  had  felt 
disinclined,  one  Sunday  morning,  to  go  to  Sunday 
School,  and  so  had  gone  and  sat  on  a  bench  on  Mid¬ 
summer  Common.  "  And  suddenly  ”  he  said  “  God 
was  all  round  me.  Just  sweetness  and  light.  And  life 
has  never  been  quite  the  same  since.”  This  is  a  specially 
interesting  experience,  not  only  because  of  the  lad’s 
simplicity,  and  of  the  fact  that  he  had  read  no  mystical 
literature  and  so  could  not  have  been  even  unconsciously 
repeating  another's  experience,  but  because  of  the  refer¬ 
ence  to  light.  It  would  be  a  profitable  exercise  for  the 
reader  to  collect,  from  the  Old  and  New  Testament, 
and  if  possible  from  religious  biographies  and  books  of 
first  band  mystical  experience,  and  from  the  experience 
of  friends,  examples  of  visions  and  revelations  of  God, 
and  to  note  how  universally  they  are  accompanied  by  the 
sensation  of  light.  But  more  vitally  important  is  the 
experience  of  God  as  “  sweetness.”  I  do  not  believe 
that  it  is  possible  to  argue,  from  the  beauty  and  marvel¬ 
lousness  of  nature,  that  God  is  good.  “  Nature  red  in 
tooth  and  claw  ”  is  quite  compatible  with  a  god  of 
cruelty  and  malice.  I  do,  on  the  other  hand,  believe 
that  we  can  find,  in  moral  and  practical  experience, 
good  reasons  for  believing,  though  not  perhaps  con¬ 
clusive  proof,  that  “  God  is  Love.”  But  the  real  ground 
for  that  faith  is  experience.  Those  who  feel  the  sun’s 
rays  find  them  warm.  Those  who  know  God  find 
Him  good,  experience  Him  to  be  Love,  enjoy  Him  as 
f  sweetness  and  light.”  That  “  God  is  Love  ”  is  a 
proposition  established  by  the  experience  of  those  who 
know  Him. 

I  shall  try,  in  the  next  two  chapters,  to  examine  other 


36 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


forms  of  religious  experience,  and  to  draw  out  their 
lessons  for  our  own  personal  religion.  In  so  doing  we 
shall,  I  hope,  find  what  lessons  we  are  to  learn  from  the 
third  and  fourth  elements  of  religious  experience  noted 
above  in  connection  with  Moses’  vision.  We  shall, 
that  is  to  say,  find  why,  when  Moses  would  have  seen 
God’s  "  glory,”  he  was  shewn  His  “  goodness,”  and 
wrhat  is  the  meaning  of  the  shadowing  by  God’s  hand 
in  the  cleft  of  the  rock.  Here  let  us  just  sum  up  the 
lessons  of  this  chapter.  They  are  two. 

Firstly,  think  nobly  of  your  soul,  and  of  its  value. 
If  you  are  worth  God’s  care,  and  unwearying  attention 
and  watchfulness,  you  are  of  infinite  value.  This  thought 
will  not  lead  you  to  conceit.  Rathei  it  will  lead  you 
to  true  Christian  humility,  for  it  will  constantly  bring 
before  you  the  gulf  between  what  you  are  and  what 
God  desires  you  to  be  and  means  to  make  you. 

And  secondly,  never  doubt  God’s  love  and  patience. 
It  is  quite  certain  that  no  earthly  friend  thinks  as  highly 
of  you  as  God  does,  nor  has  such  a  high  ideal  for  you  or 
such  faith  in  your  power  to  attain  to  it.  Here  again  we 
need  not  fear  that  this  thought  will  lead  us  to  presume 
on  God’s  love.  Rather  it  wrill  spur  us  on  to  become  less 
unworthy  of  it. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


37 


CHAPTER  V 

VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCES — (il)  MORAL 

In  the  last  chapter  we  considered  some  examples  of 
religious  experience  of  the  mystical  kind,  and  saw  that 
men  and  women  of  to-day  are  as  open  to  God’s  direct 
revelation  of  Himself  as  they  were  in  Bible  times.  And 
I  wTould  repeat,  what  I  have  already  said,  that  such 
mystical  experiences  are  very  much  commoner  than 
most  people  suppose.  Our  national  reticence  on  religion 
and  a  natural  and  commendable  unwillingness  to  speak 
to  all  and  sundry  of  our  deepest  soul’s  experiences — 
to  talk  of  which  in  mixed  company,  and  before  un¬ 
sympathetic  and  perhaps  sceptical  persons,  is  a  true 
casting  of  pearls  before  swine — and  an  unnatural 
and  far  from  commendable  faithlessness  which  often 
leads  people,  when  the  “  tunes  of  refreshing  .  .  .  from 
the  presence  of  the  Lord  ” 1  are  passed,  to  look  on  them 
as  a  delusion,  and  to  regard  spiritual  deadness  and 
coldness  as  their  true  and  natural  state — as  if,  when  a 
cloud  passes  over  the  sun  I  should  deny  that  there 
really  was  any  sun  in  the  heavens  at  all,  and  declare 
that  my  experience  of  its  warmth  and  light  w^as  a  mere 
delusion — all  these  things  combine  to  make  people 
believe  true  mystical  experience  of  God  to  be  a  fruit  of 
hysteria  and  self  deception,  or  at  any  rate  a  very  rare 
and  exceptional  thing  granted  to  very  few  of  God’s 
greatest  saints.  But  indeed  direct  personal  experiences 

1  Acts  iii.  19. 


38 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


of  God,  accompanied  sometimes,  but  not  always,  by 
sensations  of  light,  of  intense  happiness  and  joy,  and  of 
voices  heard  or  visions  seen,  are  very  far  from  un¬ 
common.  A  good  number  of  years  ago  I  said,  when 
writing  of  the  things  described  in  the  Bible  narratives, 
that  I  divided  them  into  four  classes  as  follows  : 

(i)  Those  things  of  which  I  could  say  “  I  know  this  is 
true,  for  God  has  treated  me  in  the  same  way.” 

(ii)  Those  of  which  I  could  say,  “  I  know  this  is 
true,  for  though  I  personally  have  never  had  such 
an  experence  I  know  people  who  have.” 

(iii)  Those  of  which  I  could  say  “  I  believe  this  to  be 
true,  for  though  I  have  never  met  with  such  a  case  I 
know  enough  of  human  nature,  and  of  God’s  ways  with 
man,  to  see  that  it  is  natural  and  suitable.  ” 

(iv)  Those  things  of  which  I  had  to  say  “  This  I  do 
not  understand.  It  corresponds  with  nothing  in  my 
own  experience,  or  the  experience  of  those  I  have 
talked  with.” 

Now  after  a  good  number  of  years  of  Bible  study,  and 
of  efforts  to  understand  God’s  dealings  with  man,  and 
after  many  open  hearted  talks  on  religion  with  men  and 
women  of  all  classes,  and  in  all  stages  of  religious 
development,  I  am  more  than  ever  convinced  that  there 
is  no  religious  experience  described  in  Holy  Scripture 
which  cannot  be  parallelled  by  something  similar  to-day. 
Many  things  in  the  Bible  which  I  should  once  have  had 
to  put  in  class  ii  or  iii,  or  even  in  class  iv,  as  described 
above,  I  can  now  put  in  class  i,  as  something  that  I  can 
match  in  my  own  life.  I  say  “  many  things  ;  ”  not 
of  course  all,  for  the  Bible  is  the  record  of  the  religious 
experience  of  a  whole  nation,  and  that  the  nation  most 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


39 


richly  endowed  with  religious  genius  of  any  in  the  world. 
No  single  individual’s  religious  life  can  be  as  full  and 
deep,  and  broad,  as  that  of  a  nation.  But  by  drawing 
as  freely  as  possible  on  what  others  have  told  me  the 
number  of  things  in  Holy  Scripture  of  which  I  have  to 
say :  “  This  is  a  sealed  book  to  me ;  I  do  not  know  what 
this  means,”  has  greatly  decreased  and  of  many  other 
things,  of  which  I  used  once  to  say  merely  that  I  could 
see  them  to  be  possible,  I  can  now  say  that  I  know  them 
to  be  true  since  I  have  met  similar  examples  of  God’s 
dealings  with  souls  in  my  own  circle  of  friends  and 
acquaintances. 

Now  this  is  evidently  a  great  help  to  faith.  Often 
when  young  people  speak  to  me  of  having  “  lost  faith 
in  religion  ”  I  feel  inclined  to  say :  “  Oh !  nonsense.  You 
have  not  lost  faith.  How  can  you  lose  what  you  never 
had  ?  You  have  no  religious  experience.  You  have 
never  taken  any  real  interest  in  your  own  soul,  or  in 
anything  but  the  mere  externals  of  religion.  Be 
humble.  Be  patient.  Try  to  be  good.  Wait  upon 
the  Lord.  When  you  have  one  grain  of  real  first  hand 
religious  experience  to  rest  on  we  shall  hear  no  more  of 
losing  faith  in  religion.  And,  since  '  to  everyone  that 
hath,  shall  be  given,  and  he  shall  have  abundance  ’ 1 
where  you  have  a  grain  of  religious  experience  you  will 
soon  have  more  and  more  till  you  too  have  abundance.” 

How  then  may  the  reader  increase  his  or  her  stores  of 
true  religious  experience  ?  I  am  quite  certain  that  the 
first  and  most  indispensible  thing  is  the  study  of  Holy 
Scripture.  I  do  not  believe  there  is  anything,  no  not 
even  the  neglect  of  private  prayer,  or  of  public  worship, 

1  S.  Matt.  xxv.  29. 


40 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


which  has  done,  and  is  doing,  so  much  harm  to  religion 
in  England  to-day,  as  the  neglect  of  Bible  reading.  The 
doctor  who  desires  to  recognise  various  diseases  when 
he  sees  them,  and  to  disagnose  his  patients’  complaints 
correctly,  must  first  “walk  the  hospitals,”  and  study 
many  examples  of  each  disease  in  the  wards.  The 
naturalist,  whether  botanist,  zoologist  or  geologist, 
who  would  recognise  the  various  types  and  genera  he 
studies,  must  first  read  of  them  in  text  books,  and 
examine  them  on  the  shelves  of  museums.  For  the 
student  of  religion  the  Bible  is  the  great  text-book 
and  museum  and  picture  gallery  combined,  where  he 
may  study  examples  of  God’s  dealings  with  souls  and 
of  the  soul’s  reaction  to  God’s  treatment.  It  is  no  use 
reading  the  Bible  in  a  hurry.  It  must  be  read  slowly, 
and  thought  over,  and  prayed  about.  It  is  no  use 
expecting  to  get  the  spiritual  value  till  we  know  the  facts 
and  are  familiar  with  the  characters  and  incidents. 
It  is  no  use  resting  satisfied  with  the  mere  details  of  the 
story  ;  we  must  go  on  and  ask  what  is  the  spiritual 
lesson  to  be  learned,  and  the  spiritual  truth  which  the 
story  illustrates.  And  even  this  is  not  enough.  When 
we  have  learned  the  lesson  any  passage  teaches  us  we 
must  try  to  find  illustrations  of  the  same  truth  in  our 
daily  life,  in  ourselves  or  our  friends. 

Now  of  mystical  experience  of  God,  such  as  we 
considered  in  the  last  chapter,  there  are  two  or  three 
very  important  things  to  be  said.  They  are  so  vitally 
important  that  I  will  treat  them  in  detail. 

(i)  They  must  never  be  sought.  It  is  not  for  us  to 
rush  into  God’s  presence,  but  for  Him  to  come  to  us, 
when  He  sees  fit.  Our  part  is  to  wait  upon  God.  To 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


4* 


try  and  attain  to  direct  experience  of  God  by  means  of 
worked  up  feelings  and  excited  emotions  is  to  court 
disappointment  and  disillusionment,  if  not  something 
worse.  All  notable  revelations  come  suddenly,  un¬ 
expectedly,  unsought.  One  of  the  most  remarkable, 
and  I  believe  one  of  the  most  valuable,  experiences  of 
which  I  have  any  record  was  described  by  the  man  to 
whom  it  was  granted  in  a  letter  to  his  mother.  He  laid 
great  stress  on  the  fact  that  he  was  in  no  way  "  worked 
up '  *  at  the  time,  nor  was  he  feeling  in  anyway  different 
from  what  he  usually  did,  nor  was  he  expecting  or  asking 
for  any  special  revelation.  “  I  was  just  praying  quietly 
in  church/'  he  wrote,  and  all  of  a  sudden  it  happened." 
And  he  went  on  to  say  that  he  was  so  afraid  of  self 
deception  that  he  waited  six  months  before  writing 
about  it  to  his  mother,  to  see,  as  he  said,  if  it  bore 
fruits  of  righteousness  in  life,  and  was  in  that  way  shewn 
to  be  genuine  and  sent  from  God. 

(ii)  They  are  no  proofs  of  special  holiness.  In  every 
age  wise  directors  of  the  souls  of  others  have  recognised 
that  if  such  special  revelations  and  mystical  experiences 
are  a  great  privilege  they  are  also  a  great  responsibility 
and  may  be  a  great  danger.  They  are  no  proof  of  special 
holiness.  Indeed  it  is  quite  possible  that  in  some  cases 
they  are  God’s  method  of  awakening,  from  the  torpor 
of  sin  and  sloth,  souls  deaf  to  the  more  quiet  voice  of 
conscience.  And  at  any  rate  there  is  no  room  for 
glorying.  Such  things  should  be  spoken  of  only  to  a 
few,  and  to  wise  councillors,  and  with  humility.  And 
as  there  must  be  no  effort  to  attain  such  experiences, 
so  there  must  be  no  effort  to  re-enduce  them,  and  no 
surprise  or  disillusionment  if  the  vision  passes  not  to  be 


42 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


repeated.  As  the  young  soldier,  mentioned  in  the  last 
chapter,  said  “  Once  is  enough.  You  don't  need  that 
sort  of  thing  often.”  Yet  while  we  make  no  effort  to 
re-enduce  these  times  of  enlightenment — since  God  "will 
grant  them  again  if  He  sees  fit,  and  if  He  does  not  so 
see  fit  we  can  gain  nothing  by  going  contrary  to  His 
will — yet  we  do  well  constantly  to  recall  past  blessings 
to  memory.  For  we  may  truly  say  “  The  merciful  and 
gracious  Lord  has  so  done  His  marvellous  works,  that 
they  ought  to  be  had  in  remembrance.”  1 

(iii)  No  one  need  be  depressed  at  not  having  such 
experiences.  Some  people,  reading  of  remarkable 
religious  experiences,  are  depressed  and  disheartened 
because  they  have  not  themselves  experienced  any  such. 
But  there  is  no  need  for  such  depression,  and  that  for 
two  reasons.  Firstly,  God  may  still  have  such  things 
in  reserve  for  you.  They  do  not  happen  often  in  any¬ 
one's  life  ;  perhaps  not  more  than  once  in  the  case  of 
most  people.  And  they  come  as  often  in  old  age  as  in 
middle  age,  and  more  often  in  either  than  in  youth. 
Sc  for  any  soul  they  may  still  be  to  come.  And  secondly, 
they  are  quite  certainly  not  universal  and  possibly  quite 
exceptional.  What  I  mean  is  that  there  are  certainly 
some  and  possibly  many  peisons  who  cannot  have  these 
experiences.  This  is  denied  by  some  writers  on  mysti¬ 
cism.  They  say  that  all  souls  must  possess  the  power  of 
direct  experience  of  God,  and  that  therefore  all  souls 
are  capable  of  mystical  experience  of  God.  I  do  not 
think  so.  I  am  sure  all  souls  will  have  direct  experience 
of  God  either  in  this  life  or  hereafter.  And  I  am  sure 
that,  even  in  this  life,  all  souls  can  truly  know  God. 

1  Ps.  cxi.  4 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


43 


But  I  do  not  believe  that  that  direct  open  eyed  experience 
of  God  which  I  have  called  mystical  experience,  and 
which  expresses  itself  in  visions,  voices,  and  revelations 
is  granted  to  all,  though  I  believe  that  many  who 
might  enjoy  it  do  not  now  do  so  because  their  souls 
are  not  enlightened,  but  “  are  choked  with  cares  and 
riches  and  pleasures  of  this  life.,,  1 

So  then  any  of  us  who  have  never  been  granted  any 
special  mystical  experiences  need  not  trouble.  If 
they  are  good  for  us  God  will  grant  them  to  us  when  we 
are  fit  to  receive  them.  And  if  they  are  not  good  for 
us  we  need  not  desire  them.  One  thing  we  can  do.  We 
can  strive  to  become  fit,  and  to  see  that  no  cloud  of 
wilful  and  unrepented  sin  hinders  the  time  when 
“  the  day  shall  dawn  and  the  day  star  arise  in  your 
hearts.”  2 

And  that  last  thought  leads  us  to  what  is  the  real 
topic  of  this  chapter.  There  is  a  way  to  the  knowledge 
of  God  which  is  sure,  direct,  and  open  to  all,  and  which 
we  not  only  may,  but  are  in  duty  bound,  to  seek.  It 
is  the  way  of  morality.  Do  you  want  an  immediate, 
direct  and  certain  proof  that  God  is  Holy  ?  Try  to 
pray  when  you  are  full  of  angry,  selfish,  impure,  or 
revengeful  thoughts  and  you  will  prove  for  yourself 
the  truth  of  the  psalmist’s  words  “  If  I  incline  unto 
wickedness  with  mine  heart,  the  Lord  will  not  hear  me.”  3 
It  is  one  of  the  most  real,  vivid,  and  indisputable 
pieces  of  religious  experience,  and  one,  alas,  which  we 
have  all  had.  Sin  in  the  heart  cuts  us  off  from  God  as 
if  a  great  iron  curtain  had  fallen  between  us  and  Him. 
And  if  we  have  had  past  experience  of  the  power  of 

1  St.  Luke  viii.  14.  2  2  Peter  i.  19.  3  Ps.  lxvi.  16. 


44 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


prayer,  so  that  we  can  go  on,  as  the  psalmist  does,  and 
say :  “  But  God  hath  heard  me,  and  considered  the  voice 
of  my  prayer.  Praised  be  God  Who  hath  not  cast  out 
my  prayer  nor  turned  His  mercy  from  me,”  we  shall 
find  this  sad  power  of  sin  in  the  heart  to  cut  us  off  from 
God  a  very  certain  proof  at  once  of  His  reality  and  of 
His  holiness. 

But  we  can  have  a  happy  and  positive,  as  well  as  a 
sad  and  negative  proof  of  God’s  holiness.  Here  is  a 
lovely  story.  A  tram  conductor  was  once  giving  an 
address  at  a  religious  meeting  for  the  tramway  men  of  a 
neighbouring  town.  He  explained  that  his  parents  had 
allowed  him  to  grow  up  without  any  religious  teaching 
at  church  or  chapel,  that  he  had  attended  no  Sunday 
School,  and  was  a  man  of  no  education.  ”  But  one 
thing,  brothers,  I  can  say  to  you.  Try  being  kind  and 
gentle,  and  patient  to  the  old  woman  who  digs  you  in 
the  ribs  three  times  in  five  minutes  and  says  '  Have  we 
passed  John  Street '  and  see  what  it  does  for  the  sweet¬ 
ness  and  quiet  of  your  own  soul.”  This  man  had  proved 
for  himself,  by  first-hand  experience,  the  truth  of  the 
words  of  S.  John  that  “  God  is  love,  and  he  that  dwelleth 
in  love  dwelleth  in  God,  and  God  in  him.”1  And  we 
can  all  prove  this  for  ourselves,  and  learn  by  daily 
experience — experience  that  “  love,  joy,  peace,  long- 
suffering,  gentleness,  goodness,  meekness,  faith  and 
self  restraint,”2  are  not  only  the  fruit  of  the  Spirit, 
but  the  means  which  God  has  put  in  our  own  hands 
of  bringing  Him  into  our  hearts. 

Nor  is  it  only  our  affections  which  are  warmed  and 

1  i  S.  John  iv.  16.  2  Gal.  v.  23. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


45 


stirred,  and  our  wills  which  are  braced  and  strengthened 
by  efforts  after  a  holy  life.  Nothing  enlightens  the 
intellect  and  clears  away  religious  doubts  and  difficulties 
so  surely  as  holy  living.  It  is  a  pity  that  a  poor  trans¬ 
lation  conceals  from  many  readers  the  true  meaning  of 
our  Saviour’s  words  in  S.  John  vii.  17.  It  should  read  : 
“  If  any  man  willeth  ( i.e .  makes  up  his  mind,  and  sets 
his  will)  to  do  His  will  he  shall  know  of  the  doctrine, 
whether  it  be  of  God.”  This  great  truth  cannot  be  too 
much  insisted  on.  I  do  not  say  that  all  unbelief  has  its 
roots  in  moral  evil.  No  indeed  !  Many  moral  and  nobly 
living  men  are  sceptics  owing  to  ignorance,  faults  in  their 
upbringing,  the  ill  example  of  professing  Christians,  and 
other  causes.  But  I  do  assert,  for  I  have  many  times 
found  it  to  be  true,  that  a  bad  life  is  a  very  frequent, 
and  quite  sufficient,  cause  of  unbelief.  And  I  do  also 
assert,  for  that  too  I  have  many  times  found  to  be  true, 
that  there  is  no  surer  or  more  certain  path  to  a  firm  and 
assured  faith,  and  to  such  knowledge  of  “  the  doctrine  ” 
as  convinces  us  that  it  is  ”  of  God  ”  than  a  steady  and 
sustained  effort  after  goodness. 

So  if  you  desire  to  make  progress  in  your  own  personal 
religion  do  not  trouble  yourself  about  visions,  revela¬ 
tions,  and  mystical  experiences.  These  will  come  if 
God  sees  fit,  and  are  most  likely  to  come  where  you  are 
morally  fit  for  them.  But  do  set  your  heart  to  do 
His  will  for  there  is  no  more  certain  path  to  the  knowledge 
of  God  than  a  “  patient  continuance  in  well  doing 
and  the  way  of  morality  is  a  path  to  the  feet  of  God  which 
lies  open  to  all  of  us. 


1  Rom.  ii.  7. 


46 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  VI 

VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE — (ill)  PRACTICAL 

In  the  last  chapter  we  considered  that  path  to  the 
knowledge  of  God  which  is  offered  by  what  we  call 
morality  ;  by  an  effort,  that  is  to  say,  to  realize  holiness 
in  ordinary  daily  life.  And  we  recognised  two  things, 
firstly  that  wilful  sin  bars  the  way  to  God,  so  that  “  if 
I  incline  unto  wickedness  with  my  heart  the  Lord  will 
not  hear  me/’  and  secondly  that  a  strict  and  holy  life 
is  a  means  to  the  knowledge  of  God  and  of  religious 
truth,  so  that  “  if  any  man  willeth  to  do  His  will,  he 
shall  know  of  the  doctrine  whether  it  be  of  God/’ 

Now  having  discussed  these  subjects  many  times  with 
many  people,  I  know  that  both  these  truths  are  often 
denied.  Let  us  consider  the  first  assertion,  that  sin 
cuts  us  off  from  God.  Any  priest  who  is  accustomed  to 
hear  confessions  will  be  told,  from  time  to  time,  by  some 
penitent :  “  Though  I  have  fallen  back  into  sin  so  many 
times  since  my  last  confession,  yet  I  think  I  have  made 
some  progress  in  other  ways.  Between  my  falls  I  have 
prayed  earnestly  and  with  happiness,  and  God  has  never 
seemed  so  real  and  religion  so  helpful.”  Now  of  course 
there  may  be  cases  where  an  earnest  effort  is  being  made 
to  cure  some  long  standing  fault  of  character,  and  to 
break  the  chain  of  past  sin,  and  where,  in  spite  of 
occasional  failures,  real  progress  is  being  made  and 
where  therefore,  in  the  intervals  between  defeats, 
God  may  indeed  be  a  reality  to  the  soul,  and  religion 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


47 


a  help.  But  generally  speaking  the  state  of  things 
described  above,  in  which  frequent  and  recurrent  sin 
has  little  or  no  effect  to  choke  prayer,  or  spoil  the  joy  of 
religion,  is  a  most  deadly  and  dangerous  one.  It  means 
that,  in  some  particular,  the  soul  has  made  a  truce  with 
Satan,  and  has  said,  more  or  less  consciously,  “  In  all 
else  I  will  serve  God,  but  in  this  sin  I  will  allow  myself.” 
But  that  line  of  conduct,  if  persisted  in,  always  leads  to 
the  total  ruin  of  a  soul,  and  often  to  some  dreadful 
public  collapse  which  makes  men  say :  "  How  could  so 
good  and  great  a  man,  who  spoke  so  nobly  for  his 
Master,  and  knew  so  much  of  the  deep  things  of  the 
spiritual  life,  have  come  to  such  a  pass  ?  Was  it  hypocrisy 
all  the  time  ?  ”  The  answer  is  that  it  was  not  hypocrisy, 
if  by  that  is  meant  the  conscious  playing  of  a  part,  and 
pretending  what  was  not  really  meant  or  felt.  No  ;  the 
dreadful  thing  was  that,  in  the  intervals  between  the 
falls,  the  man  was  wholly  in  earnest,  “  God  a  reality 
and  religion  helpful.”  Ask  yourself  earnestly  whether 
your  sins  have  ceased  to  hinder  your  religion.  And  if 
you  are  bound  to  answer  that  it  is  so,  then  be  horribly 
afraid.  For  be  sure  of  this  that  if  your  sins  have  ceased 
to  hinder  your  religion,  then  your  religion  has  ceased 
to  hinder  your  sins.  And  that  is  the  surest  sign  of  a 
soul  already  "  dead  in  trespasses  and  sins  ” 1  or  at  best 
in  mortal  peril. 

So  we  may  conclude  that  it  is  true  that  sin  always 
cuts  us  off  from  communion  with  God,  and  that  in 
those  cases  where  it  seems  not  to  have  this  effect  there 
is  the  more  cause  for  fear. 

The  second  objection  is  far  more  commonly  made. 

1  Eph.  ii.  i. 


48 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


People  say  that  a  good  life  cannot  be  a  path  to  the 
knowledge  of  God  since  many  of  the  noblest  and  best 
men  and  women  of  their  acquaintance  have  no  religious 
faith  of  any  kind.  Now  this  argument  is  so  frequently 
used,  and  does  so  much  to  encourage  many  people, 
especially  young  men  and  women,  to  think  religion 
a  thing  of  no  value,  producing  no  valuable  fruits, 
that  it  is  well  worth  examining.  And  I  would  very 
earnestly  beg  my  readers  to  deal  honestly  with  themselves 
and  not  to  be  content  with  vague  generalities,  and  hasty 
assertions.  Are  the  best  and  noblest  men  and  women 
you  know  without  religious  beliefs  ?  Are  they  really? 
Would  you  be  prepared  to  take  a  piece  of  paper  and  pencil 
and  write  down  a  list  of  those  you  have  really  most 
loved  and  honoured,  and  then  to  mark  with  a  cross 
those  who  had  a  vital  religion  of  their  own,  and  with  an 
asterisk  those  who  had  none  ?  Try  it.  I  will  speak  for 
myself.  My  father,  my  mother,  my  old  headmaster, 
two  of  my  other  masters  who  left  their  mark  deep  upon 
me,  my  first  vicar  at  the  church  where  I  was  brought  up, 
several  of  my  teachers  at  Cambridge,  many  scores  of 
plain  men  and  women,  known  and  honoured  and  loved 
in  the  various  churches  where  I  have  worked,  men  and 
women  met  in  daily  life  in  London  and  Leeds  and 
Manchester,  these  pass  before  my  mind’s  eye  as  I  write, 
an  exceeding  great  army.  And  in  each  and  all  burned 
the  fire  of  a  vivid  personal  religion.  I  do  not  want  to 
suggest  for  a  moment  that  all  church  and  chapel  going 
folk  are  perfect.  The  Christianity  of  some  (not  of 
as  many  as  the  world  likes  to  pretend,  yet  certainly  of 
some)  is  merely  nominal.  I  do  not  mean  to  deny  that 
I  have  met  men  of  noble  life  without  religious  faith. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


49 


though  they  have  been  much  fewer  than  one  would 
suppose  from  the  way  in  which  many  people  talk.  But 
when  I  sit  down,  in  a  quiet  hour,  to  weigh  and  estimate 
what  I  have  seen  and  known  of  men  and  women  I  can 
say,  with  no  uncertain  voice,  that  even  here  and  now 
God  is  already  “  glorified  in  His  saints  ” 1  and  religious 
faith  justified  by  its  fruits.  This  is  certainly  not 
because  I  do  not  know  now,  and  have  not  known  in  the 
past,  plenty  of  people  without  religious  faith.  There 
was  perhaps  no  time  in  which  Robert  Browning’s  cry, 

“  How  hard  a  thing  it  is  to  be 
A  Christian.  Hard  for  you  and  me,” 

was  more  true  than  in  the  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth 
century  when  the  dogmatic  materialism  of  Huxley  and 
Tyndale  ruled  most  minds.  And  at  college,  and  since, 
I  have  known  many  men  whose  religion  gave  way  under 
the  strain  which  the  new  knowledge  in  physical  science, 
historical  research,  and  biblical  criticism,  seemed  to 
lay  upon  it.  But  I  have  never  known  a  man  who  did 
not  seem  to  me  to  suffer  grievous  loss  in  surrendering 
his  faith.  And  as  for  the  statement,  so  commonly 
made  in  newspapers  to-day,  that  those  who  follow  up 
their  religion  are  certainly  no  better  and  quite  possibly 
worse,  less  brave,  less  manly,  less  unselfish,  less  kindly, 
less  truly  and  essentially  Christ-like,  than  men  and 
women  of  the  world  who  make  no  effert  to  seek  God,  the 
statement  seems  to  me  to  be  a  silly  delusion  fathered 
by  Satan,  the  Father  of  lies,  repeated  by  the  papers 
because  it  is  popular  with  the  men  and  women  whose 
vanity  it  flatters,  and  welcomed  by  people  whom  it 

1  2  Thess.  i.  io. 


E 


50 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


encourages  in  their  disinclination  to  face  the  hardships 
and  privations  of  discipleship  to  One  Who  said :  “If 
any  man  will  come  after  Me,  let  him  deny  himself, 
and  take  up  his  cross  daily,  and  follow  Me.” 1 

At  any  rate  let  us  have  no  hypocrisy.  If  anyone 
really  and  truly  believes  that  an  earnest  effort  after 
the  knowledge  and  love  of  God,  and  a  strenuous  en¬ 
deavour  after  the  holiness  “  without  which  no  man  shall 
see  the  Lord  ” 2  yields  no  fruit  and  that  those  who  are 
without  religion  are  as  good,  or  better,  than  those  with 
it,  then  let  him  cease  wasting  his  time  with  religion  at 
all.  If  he  is  right  it  is  not  worth  bothering  with.  But 
if,  on  careful  and  earnest  reflection,  a  man  is  bound  to 
admit  that  where  there  is  a  real  vital  religion  there 
is  nobility  of  character,  and  a  power  in  the  lives  of 
others,  and  an  attractive  force  which  is  found  nowhere 
else,  and  a  vision  of  God  which  brings  Heaven  down  to 
earth,  and  a  foretaste  of  life  eternal,  then  let  him  guard 
his  tongue  and  not  give  support  to  this  silly— -and  if 
rightly  understood  blasphemous — depreciation  of  true 
religion,  and  praise  of  godlessness.  For  by  it  many 
are  encouraged  to  go  on  living  without  God,  and 
many  of  His  “  little  ones  ”  are  offended  and  caused 
to  stumble. 

For  my  own  part  I  have  never  seen  any  occasion  to 
regret  an  answer  I  once  gave  to  a  question  flung  at 
me  at  a  dinner-hour  service  outside  a  mill  in  Burnley. 
A  workingman  shouted  out  to  me,  as  I  was  preaching 
during  one  of  the  Open-Air  Services  of  a  Ten  Day 
Mission,  “  Governor,  will  you  give  us  one  plain  reason 
why  you  believe  in  religion  ?  ”  I  had  never  had  it  put 

1  S.  Luke  ix.  23.  2  Heb.  xii.  14. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


5i 


to  me  quite  like  that  before,  but  I  was  in  no  doubt 
as  to  my  answer.  Indeed  I  do  truly  believe  that  there, 
and  for  me,  were  fulfilled  Christ's  words  of  promise, 
“  It  shall  be  given  you,  in  that  same  hour,  what  ye  shall 
speak.”1  At  any  rate  I  replied  at  once  :  “  Aye  I  will. 
I  believe  in  Christianity  because  I  find  it  suits  boys  and 
girls.”  And  I  went  on  to  point  out  that  they  believed 
the  same  and  that  many  of  them,  like  many  of  the  parents 
in  my  own  parish,  while  neglecting  religion  themselves 
were  yet  anxious  that  their  boys  and  girls  should  stick 
to  church  and  Sunday  School,  and  follow  up  their 
religion,  because,  as  they  themselves  would  say,  “  I 
want  our  John  Willie  ”  or  “I  want  our  Lizzie  Ann 
to  grow  up  good.”  It  is  a  plain  fact  of  experience, 
verified  daily  for  those  who  keep  their  eyes  open  and 
are  interested  in  such  things,  that  boys  and  girls  who 
really  try  to  practice  their  religion,  do  indeed  increase 
“  in  wisdom  and  stature,  and  in  favour  with  God  and 
man.” 2  And  the  opposite  is  equally  true.  During  the 
last  twenty  years  I  have  been  appealed  to,  again  and 
again,  by  parents  in  every  walk  in  life  from  the  richest 
to  the  poorest,  with  the  request  that  I  would  “  speak 
to  ”  some  young  man  or  young  woman  who  was  causing 
anxiety  to  relations  and  friends.  And  in  the  vast 
majority  of  cases  I  have  found  that  there  has  been  no 
religion  in  the  life  of  the  boy  or  girl.  I  wonder  how 
many  times  I  have  been  told,  in  answer  to  some  question 
of  mine,  “  I  believe  he  was  confirmed  at  school.  I 
know  his  House  Master  wrote  about  it.  But  his  father 
has  always  been  so  much  against  religion,  and  it  made 
so  much  unpleasantness  at  home,  that  I  am  afraid  he 

1  S.  Matt.  x.  19.  2  S.  Luke  ii.  52. 


52 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


has  never  gone  to  church  much  in  the  holidays.  But 
we  are  both  so  anxious  about  him  now  I  am  sure  his 
father  would  not  mind  if  you  could  get  the  boy  interested 
in  church.”  This  is  the  practical  proof  of  the  truth  of 
religion,  namely  that  it  works.  Of  course  an  unwise 
insistence  on  religion  with  young  people,  and  a  clumsy 
or  unloving  presentation  of  it  to  them,  will  alienate 
some  of  them.  And  since  we  all  have  free  will,  and 
some  men  use  that  free  will  to  chose  evil  and  not  good, 
the  wisest  and  most  loving  parents  may  fail  to  make  their 
children  love  God,  even  as  our  Wise  and  Loving  Father 
is  not  successful  with  all  His  children.  But  speaking 
generally  wisdom  is  justified  of  her  children  and  the 
best  proof  of  the  truth  of  religion  is  the  lives  of  those 
who  love  the  Lord.  I  am  quite  prepared  to  throw 
down  this  challenge  to  the  world,  and  to  let  Christianity 
stand  or  fall  by  its  fruits.  Indeed  when  I  consider  the 
characters  of  many  plain  men  and  women,  boys  and 
girls,  who  in  dull  lives  of  hard  work  and  small  pay  and 
scant  pleasure,  live  for  God  and  to  serve  others,  I  ask 
myself  what  must  be  the  beauty  of  God  Himself  when  the 
reflexion  of  His  glory  in  the  faces  of  his  children  is  so 
fair.  It  ought  not  to  be  difficult  to  believe  in  religion 
when  we  are  “  compassed  about  with  so  great  a  cloud 
of  witnesses.”  1  If  you  love  goodness,  and  have  a  quick 
eye  for  the  beauty  of  holiness,  you  need  not  lack  proofs 
of  the  power  of  the  Holy  Spirit  in  the  lives  of  men. 

And  as  in  men,  so  in  nations.  I  do  not  pretend  that 
it  is  easy  for  plain  men  and  women  to  understand  God’s 
workings  in  history  or  to  interpret  His  dealings  with  the 
nations.  It  requires  wide  reading  in  secular  history, 

1  Heb.  xii.  i. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


53 


and  a  mind  soaked  in  the  teachings  of  the  Bible,  and 
true  humility,  and  some  portion  of  the  prophetic  spirit, 
before  we  can  begin  to  trace  God’s  hand  in  the  course  of 
current  politics  and  the  march  of  contemporary  events, 
and  to  see  His  judgments  and  His  rewards.  But  I  am 
sure  we  can  soon  learn  enough  to  recognise  the  truth  of 
the  words  “  Righteousness  exalteth  a  nation.”  1  And 
a  deep  and  ever  deepening  conviction  of  the  reality 
of  God’s  providence  is  at  once  a  wonderful  support  to 
faith,  and  one  of  its  most  precious  fruits. 

There  is,  however,  one  history  in  which  it  is  quite 
easy  to  trace  God’s  hand  at  work,  if  we  approach  the 
task  in  the  right  spirit.  I  mean  in  a  man’s  own  history  ; 
in  his  own  life.  I  have  left  this  till  the  last  in  describing 
the  evidence — mystical,  moral  and  practical — which 
we  may  discover  for  the  truth  of  our  religion,  because 
it  is  a  kind  of  evidence  not  available  before  middle  age. 
A  good  piece  of  the  cloth  of  a  man’s  life  must  be  already 
woven  on  God’s  loom  before  the  pattern  can  be  plainly 
seen.  But  a  man  of  five  and  thirty  or  forty  ought 
to  begin  to  see  clearly  the  proofs  of  God’s  providence  in 
his  life,  and  every  additional  year  ought  to  make  those 
proofs  more  clear.  In  this  connection  I  would  quote  the 
words  which  an  old  man,  well  over  eighty,  spoke  to  me 
a  few  days  before  his  death.  He  said :  “  You  know  what 
my  life  has  been.  All  my  life  I’ve  been  a  poor  man,  and 
all  my  life  I’ve  been  a  delicate  man.  Often  I’ve  looked 
ahead  and  wondered  how  I  was  going  to  earn  enough 
to  bring  up  my  children  and  to  pay  my  way.  But 
looking  back  I  can  see  how,  at  every  turning,  God  was 
waiting  for  me  with  a  miracle.  I  can  say,  if  any  man 

1  Proverbs  xiv.  34. 


54 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


can  ‘  Surely  goodness  and  mercy  have  followed  me  all 
the  days  of  my  life/  ” 1 

And  here,  I  think,  we  find  at  last  the  meaning  of  two 
elements  of  Moses’  vision  mentioned  in  Chapter  IV. 
We  desire  to  see  God’s  glory.  We  want  to  see  His  cause 
openly  and  gloriously  vindicated,  and  evil  confounded. 
But  we  do  not.  No  sudden  and  startling  judgment 
upholds  the  righteous,  and  puts  God’s  enemies  to  shame. 
But  quietly  and  in  secret  He  makes  all  His  goodness 
pass  before  us  so  that,  at  the  end  of  a  life  which  seems 
to  have  been  hard  and  unsuccessful,  and  of  which, 
speaking  only  of  outward  things,  we  may  say  “  few  and 
evil  have  the  days  of  the  years  of  my  life  been  ”  2  we 
may  yet  say,  speaking  of  inward  things,  and  of  the  life 
of  the  soul  “  I  am  not  worthy  of  the  least  of  all  the 
mercies  and  of  all  the  truth  which  Thou  has  shewed  unto 
Thy  servant.”  3 

Nor  need  we  look  far  for  an  interpretation  of  the 
darkness  of  the  cleft  in  the  rock,  and  of  God’s  shadowing 
hand.  Often  in  times  of  bereavement,  or  of  severe 
pain,  or,  even  more,  of  prolonged  bodily  weakness,  it 
is  very  hard  to  feel  the  consolations  of  religion.  But 
when  such  times  are  over  we  look  back  and  know  that 
they  were  times  when,  in  truth,  God  was  very  near  us, 
"  passing  by,”  covering  us  with  His  hand.  This 
interpretation  of  the  passage  (and  I  mention  the  fact 
not  with  any  foolish  desire  to  claim  originality,  but 
to  prove  that  the  interpretation  is  no  fanciful  one,  but 
has  occurred  to  more  than  one  person)  had  been  my 

1  Ps.  xxiii.  6.  Bible  Version. 

2  Gen.  xlvii.  g. 

3  Gen.  xxxii.  io. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


55 


own,  and  used  by  me  in  sermons,  before  I  found  it 
expressed  in  Francis  Thompson’s  poem  The  Hound  of 
Heaven. 

“  Is  my  gloom,  after  all 

Shade  of  His  hand,  outstretched  caressingly  ?  ” 


56 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  WORLD’S  NEED  OF  GOD 

The  line  of  thought  which  we  have  been  persuing  in 
these  pages  so  far  should  now  be  fairly  clear.  We 
started  with  the  conviction  that  man  is  made  for  God, 
and  for  communion  with  God.  “  There  is  nothing 
so  native  to  man  as  God,  nor  anywhere  where  he  is 
so  completely  at  home  ”  ;  "  For  in  Him  we  live,  and 
move,  and  have  our  being.”1  Life  apart  from  and 
without  God  is  as  unnatural  to  man  as  a  life  out  of 
water  is  to  a  fish.  Hence  all  our  efforts  to  do  good  to 
others  while  we  ourselves  are  trying  to  live  without 
God  are  bound  to  be  utterly  fruitless.  What  the  world 
needs  to-day  is  God.  Whether  men  realize  it  or  not 
what  the  individual,  and  the  city,  and  the  nation,  and 
Europe,  and  the  whole  world,  cries  out  for  to-day  is 
God.  God  as  the  life  of  the  individual  soul ;  God  as 
the  power  in  which  all  tasks  are  to  be  fulfilled  ;  God  as 
the  wisdom  in  the  light  of  which  our  moral,  social, 
industrial,  and  international  problems  are  to  be  solved  ; 
God  as  Alpha  and  Omega,  the  source  and  the  end  of  all 
things  ;  it  is  God  that  man  needs  and  desires  uncon¬ 
sciously  even  when  he  sees  Him  not,  and  loves  with  a 
consuming  love  when  once  He  is  even  dimly  seen. 
Hence  a  man’s  first  and  highest  duty  is  to  seek  God, 
and  the  most  truly  social  thing  he  can  do  is  to  be  truly 
religious,  and  his  most  unselfish  work  is  the  care  of  his 

1  Acts  xvii.  28. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


57 


own  soul.  And  all  suggestions  to  the  contrary,  all 
claims  that  a  man  ought  to  forget  his  own  soul  and  try 
to  do  some  good  in  the  world  are  nonsense,  at  once 
arrogant  and  profane,  and  are  based  on  total  ignorance 
of  man’s  nature.  For  man  is  nothing,  and  can  do  nothing, 
apart  from  God. 

But  while  we  recognised  this  truth,  that  our  neighbours 
want  God  not  us,  and  that  if  we  are  to  help  them  it 
must  be  by  means  not  of  our  own  abilities,  powers, 
energy,  zeal,  eloquence,  or  charm,  but  by  just  so  much 
of  God  as  is  in  us,  we  went  on  to  recognise  the  second 
truth  namely  that  religion — and  by  religion  I  mean  the 
knowledge  and  love  of  God,  and  a  partaking  of  His  life 
— is  not  given  to  us  for  ourselves  but  for  others.  If 
we  are  to  share  God’s  life  we  must  live  God’s  life,  and 
God’s  life  is  a  life  of  love,  a  life  of  service,  a  life  of  giving, 
of  spending  and  being  spent  in  the  service  of  others. 
So  much  of  the  life  of  God  as  is  in  you  can  only  be 
kept  by  being  given  away,  only  increased  by  being  freely, 
even  recklessly,  spent.  In  spiritual  things  squandering 
is  the  best  hoarding ;  and  of  the  life  of  the  soul,  which  is 
God’s  life  in  you,  Jesus  has  said  :  “  Whosoever  will  save 
his  life  shall  lose  it ;  but  whosoever  shall  lose  his  life, 
for  My  sake  and  the  gospel’s,  the  same  shall  save  it.”  1 
And  these  are  neither  Eastern  paradoxes,  nor  pious 
platitudes,  but  statements  at  once  profoundly  true  and 
absolutely  simple  and  obvious,  of  man’s  true  nature, 
and  can  be  verified  by  any  boy  or  girl  between  breakfast 
and  lunch. 

So  then  men’s  true  nature  is  to  draw  in  life  from 
moment  to  moment  from  God,  as  a  fountain  draws 

1  S.  Mark  viii.  35. 


58 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


its  water  from  some  deep  lying  inexhaustible  reservoir 
in  the  eternal  hills,  and  then  to  pour  out  that  life  again 
in  service  to  others,  as  the  fountain  pours  out  its  waters 
to  refresh  and  quicken  men  and  animals  and  the 
parched  earth. 

But  obviously  what  we  give  out  must  be  real.  A 
merely  second-hand  religion,  knowledge  not  of  God 
but  merely  about  God ,  will  have  little  power  in  our  own 
lives  and  none  in  the  lives  of  others.  So  in  the  4th,  5th 
and  6th  chapters  we  considered  the  three  types  of 
religious  experience  by  which  men  come  to  a  vital 
religion,  namely  mystical  experience,  which  God  grants 
to  some  souls  and  is  perhaps  willing  to  grant  to  all  who 
wait  upon  Him,  and  moral  experience,  which  is  a  way 
open  to  all  of  us  and  to  which  indeed  we  are  imperiously 
called,  and  practical  experience  which  we  may  gather 
from  our  own  lives,  or  from  that  of  others,  or  from  history. 
I  have  often  thought  that  the  New  Testament  gives  us, 
in  the  four  gospels  and  in  the  epistles  of  S.  Paul, 
examples  of  these  various  types  of  experience.  S.  John 
is  the  pure  mystic,  who  declares  unto  us  that  “  God  is 
Love  ”  1  and  also  that  “  God  is  Light,  and  in  Him  is 
no  darkness  at  all.” 2  And  S.  Paul,  rich  also  in  mystical 
experience  of  rather  a  different  type,  is  the  supreme 
example  of  the  moral  experience  of  God.  His  power  to 
say,  "  for  to  me  to  live  is  Christ  and  to  die  is  gain,”3 
brings  rest  to  his  “  long  divided  heart  ”  and  unifies 
and  harmonises  all  the  riches  and  powers  of  that 
marvellous  personality.  S.  Luke,  if  I  have  read  aright 
the  life  of  the  “  beloved  physician  ”  who,  after  tasting 
all  the  bitterness  of  a  slave's  lot,  and  all  the  sin  of  a 

1  1  S.  John  iv.  16.  2  S.  John  i.  5.  3  Phil.  i.  21. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


59 


corrupt  world,  found  in  Christ  ore  Who  was  ‘‘  anointed 
to  preach  the  gospel  to  the  poor,  .  .  to  heal  the  broken 
hearted,  to  preach  deliverence  to  the  captives,  and 
recovering  of  sight  to  the  blind,  to  set  at  liberty  them 
that  are  bruised,  to  preach  the  acceptable  year  of  the 
Lord/'  is  an  example  of  those  whose  conversion  is  a 
release  from  the  bitterness  and  misery  of  sin,  and  so  a 
proof  both  moral  and  practical  of  the  power  of  Christ  to 
save.  S.  Matthew  is  surely  a  perfect  example  of  the 
man  who  can  read  the  proofs  of  God's  providence  in 
history  and  in  contemporary  politics.  Steeped  in  the 
teaching  of  the  Old  Testament  he  asks  where  are  God’s 
mercies  to  Israel,  where  the  fulfilment  of  His  promises 
to  Abraham,  Isaac,  and  Jacob.  We  can  fancy  him 
crying,  with  the  psalmist,  “  Hath  God  forgotten  to 
be  gracious  ”  and  asking  in  bitterness  of  soul  “  Is  His 
promise  come  utterly  to  an  end  for  evermore  ?  ” 1 
Only  from  Christ  does  he  learn  the  true  interpretation 
of  history,  and  come  to  see  that  the  kingdom  which 
God  promised  to  Israel  is  no  mere  earthly  kingdom  at 
Jerusalem,  but  a  kingdom  of  Heaven.  And  from  that 
moment  all  his  difficulties  vanish,  and  fife  is  not  long 
enough  for  him  to  shew  his  gratitude  to  God  by  pointing 
out  how  “  all  this  was  done  that  it  might  be  fulfilled 
which  wras  spoken  of  the  Lord  by  the  prophet  ” 2  and 
by  proclaiming  how  completely  God’s  promises  have 
been,  and  are  being,  fulfilled.  He  seems  to  say,  again 
and  again,  “  See  how  it  all  fits  in.  See  what  supports 
for  faith  are  here.  How  can  any  man  doubt  when  God’s 
hand  is  so  clearly  displayed  in  history,  and  his  providence 
vindicated  among  the  nations.”  And  finally  we  may  see 

1  Ps.  lxxvii.  9  and  v.  8.  2  S.  Matt.  i.  22. 


6o 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


in  St.  Peter — for  St.  Mark  is  only  St.  Peter’s  mouthpiece 
— a  man  who,  himself  rich  in  mystical  and  moral 
experience,  can  yet  appeal,  in  his  Gospel,  and  in  his 
speeches  in  the  Acts,  and  in  his  epistles,  to  the  plain 
man,  with  the  plain  man’s  argument  that  the  religion 
of  Jesus  Christ,  “  Who  went  about  doing  good,  and  heal¬ 
ing  all  that  were  oppressed  of  the  Devil,  for  God  was 
with  Him,”  1  is  a  religion  that  works,  that  has  power 
against  “  fleshly  lusts  which  war  against  the  soul”2 
and  makes  us  to  have  “  compassion  one  of  another 
to  love  as  brethren,  to  be  pitiful  and  courteous.”3 
No  doubt  it  would  not  be  wise  to  press  the  differences 
between  the  sacred  writers  too  far.  All  different 
types  of  religious  experience,  as  we  have  said,  shade 
off  one  into  the  other,  and  the  great  saints  doubtless 
had  very  wide  and  full  experiences.  But  at  any  rate 
they  all  combine  to  bear  witness  to  the  truth  that  there 
are  many  roads  to  the  feet  of  God  and  that  visions 
and  revelations,  struggles  against  sin  and  efforts  after 
holiness,  the  experiences  of  daily  life  and  the  witness 
of  history  all  lead  us  to  the  knowledge  and  love  of  God 
Who  is  found  in  all  these  various  ways,  yet  always 
found  to  be  One  and  the  Same,  the  perfection  of  Wisdom 
Truth  and  Beauty,  perfect  Power  and  perfect  Love. 

And  so  the  first  duty  of  every  man  and  woman  is  to 
seek  to  know  God.  A  true  religion  is  the  first  thing 
needed.  Till  you  have  that  you  have  nothing  to  give 
that  any  man  needs.  Till  you  are  yourself  in  living 
touch  with  God  you  can  no  more  help  others  than  a 
man  carrying  a  dry  and  dusty  watering  pot  can  give 
others  drink.  If  I  seem  to  insist  on  this  with  wearisome 

1  Acts  x.  38.  2  1  S.  Peter  ii.  11.  3  1  S.  Peter  iii.  8. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


61 


iteration  I  will  ask  my  readers  to  forgive  me.  But 
I  cannot  do  otherwise.  For  I  am  deeply  persuaded 
that  the  world  to-day  needs  the  lesson  of  Christ’s  word 
"  Without  Me  ye  can  do  nothing.” 1  Do  we  not  see 
proofs  of  this  powerlessness  on  every  side  ?  Is  not  the 
whole  world  a  proof  of  man’s  inability  by  himself  to 
realize  the  good  he  desires  ? 

We  all  hate  and  dread  war.  It  would  probably  be 
impossible  to  find  a  man  anywhere  to-day  who  would 
not  declare  it  to  be  an  unmixed  evil,  a  frantic  mixture 
of  wickedness  and  folly.  The  clearest  sighted  men 
believe  that  our  whole  Western  Civilization  may  yet 
crash  as  the  result  of  the  last  war,  and  that  a  second 
European  war  must  inevitably  mean  the  total  ruin  of 
our  race,  perhaps  for  centuries.  Yet  we  seem  to  be 
drifting  daily  into  war.  Why  ?  Why  cannot  our  state- 
men  save  us  ? 

We  all  are  alive  to  the  evils  of  our  modem  civilization. 
Many  view  the  present  state  of  industrial  anarchy, 
in  which  competition,  run  mad,  destroys  most  of  what 
is  beautiful  and  gracious  in  the  lives  of  rich  and  poor 
alike,  as  necessary  and  unavoidable.  Nobody  denies 
that  it  is  cruel,  wasteful,  ugly,  and  unchristian.  And 
many  millions  rebel  again  it  with  heart  and  soul,  and 
would  make  any  sacrifice  for  the  bringing  in  of  a 
better  world-order.  Yet  we  seem  powerless  to  break 
the  chains  that  bind  us,  or  to  escape  from  the  tyranny 
of  a  system  which  seems  to  offer  as  little  that  is  worth 
having  to  those  who  win  as  to  those  who  lose.  Why  ? 
Why  cannot  our  economists  and  social  philosophers 
help  us  ? 


1 S.  John  xv.  5. 


62 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


There  has,  perhaps,  never  been  a  time  when  men  and 
women  have  so  desired  happiness,  and  consciously 
set  it  before  them  as  something  which  is  their  right  to 
attain  to,  and  to  enjoy.  And  yet  the  “  happy  ending” 
in  novels,  indeed  the  novel  which  paints  life  as  a  good, 
rich,  full,  and  desirable  thing,  is  quite  out  of  favour. 
I  do  not  say,  of  course,  that  contemporary  fiction  gives 
an  accurate  picture  of  life.  Heaven  forbid.  But  the 
books  written  by  the  most  articulate  class  among  us, 
and  greedily  devoured  by  what  are  presumably  the  most 
intelligent  classes,  must  afford  some  indication  of  what 
men  and  women  are  thinking.  And  especially  one  would 
expect  this  to  be  true  in  respect  of  the  thing  which 
occupies  so  much  of  people’s  thoughts  and  conversation, 
namely  married  life.  I  think  there  can  never  have  been 
a  time  when  there  was  more  time  and  thought  devoted 
to  the  discussion  of  what  married  life  should  be.  No, 
nor  any  time  when  the  ideal  of  perfect  comradeship 
between  husband  and  wife  was  more  beautifully  con¬ 
ceived,  or  the  “  marriage  of  true  minds  ”  more  highly 
valued.  Yet  the  novels  that  attract  most  attention, 
sell  best,  are  almost  exclusively  those  which  treat 
of  incompatibility  in  marriage,  and  most  novels,  instead 
of  ending  “  and  they  married  and  lived  happy  ever 
after  ”  might  well  end  “  and  they  married  and  immedi¬ 
ately  began  to  be  miserable.”  I  do  not,  of  course, 
mean  that  novels  give  a  fair  picture  of  life  in  this  respect, 
still  less  do  I  mean  to  deny  that  there  are  many  happy 
marriages  and  happy  homes.  But  it  does  seem  to  me 
that  the  world  has  hero  an  ideal  which  it  is  largely 
unable  to  attain  to. 

And  the  same  may  be  said  in  the  religious  sphere. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


63 


Never  before  has  there  been  a  deeper  or  more  wide¬ 
spread  sense  of  the  harm  done  by  “  our  unhappy 
divisions.”  Men  and  women  of  all  denominations 
realize,  as  perhaps  never  before,  what  an  insult  to  God, 
and  hindrance  to  religion,  and  scandal  to  the  world,  is 
afforded  by  the  spectacle  of  rival  denominations  each 
more  careful  for  its  own  interests  than  for  those  of  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven,  and  each  more  hostile  to  the  others 
than  to  infidelity  and  sin.  And  yet  every  effort  after 
re-union  does  but  make  more  clear  the  indifference 
of  the  rank  and  file  at  once  in  church  and  chapel  to 
the  call  for  unity  and  the  unwillingness — perhaps 
we  ought  to  say  the  conscientious  inability — of  the 
best  and  most  earnest  Christians  to  make  any  real 
sacrifices  to  attain  the  fulfilment  of  our  Blessed  Lord’s 
prayer  “  that  they  may  be  one.”  1 

In  all  these  things  goodwill  is  not  lacking.  Indeed 
we  may  say  of  the  world,  but  slightly  altering  the 
Apostle’s  words,  that  “  the  will  is  present  with  the 
world,  but  how  to  perform  that  which  is  good  we  find 
not.  For  the  good  that  we  would,  we  do  do  ;  but  the 
evil  which  we  would  not,  that  we  do.”  2  There  is  to-day, 
as  there  was  in  S.  Paul’s  time,  but  one  solution  of  the 
difficulty.  The  power  we  need  is  in  God,  and  in  God 
alone.  The  world  needs  a  great  religious  revival,  a 
great  return  to  God.  Nothing  else  can  save  it.  In 
some  ways  things  are  ripe  for  such  a  revival.  The 
“  oppositions  of  science,  falsely  so  called,” 3  which 
made  religious  faith  so  hard  during  the  last  quarter  of 
the  nineteenth  century  are  at  an  end.  Neither  philosophy 

1  S.  John  xvii.  n.  2  Rom.  vii.  18  and  19. 

3  1  Tim.  vi,  20. 


64 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


nor  natural  science  to-day  offers  us,  as  it  were  at  the 
point  of  the  sword,  a  world  in  which  there  is  no  room 
for  God,  or  Immortality,  or  Moral  Freedom,  or  the 
reality  of  spiritual  things.  Rather  it  may  be  said  that 
the  most  distinctive  message  of  philosophy  and  science 
to  the  world  to-day  almost  echoes  the  words  of  S. 
John  “  Beloved,  now  are  we  the  sons  of  God,  and  it 
doth  not  yet  appear  what  we  shall  be .” 1  And  the 
biblical  criticism,  so  much  feared  by  our  fathers  and 
grandfathers,  after  two  generations  of  unceasing  activity 
has  surely  left  us  our  bibles  more  than  ever  established 
as  the  Spirit-inspired  record  of  God’s  dealings  with 
His  children.  And  finally  there  is  a  great,  and  I  think 
a  growing,  sense  of  the  need  for  God.  Yet  some  things 
are  lacking.  There  is  no  deep  sense  of  sin.  We  are 
sure  that  the  post-war  world  is  very  uncomfortable, 
and  very  dangerous.  We  are  hardly  prepared  to  say 
"  and  ....  indeed  justly,  for  we  receive  the  due 
reward  of  our  deeds.”  2  And  though  there  is,  as  I  have 
said,  a  great  sense  of  our  need  of  God’s  help  I  doubt  if 
there  is  any  real  understanding  of  the  conditions  on 
which  alone  that  help  can  be  had.  It  is  one  thing  to 
desire  that  God  should  come  in  and  help  us  to  make  the 
world  what  we  would  have  it  be.  It  is  another,  and  a 
very  different  thing  to  surrender  ourselves  to  Him  to 
be  His  instruments  in  making  the  world,  and  ourselves, 
what  He  would  have  it,  and  us,  to  be.  I  sometimes 
doubt  if  many,  even  among  genuinely  religious  people, 
realize  how  great  a  gulf  lies  between  these  two  attitudes 
of  mind.  I  am  sure  that  the  attitude  of  many  well- 
meaning,  but  unconverted  and  worldly-minded  people 

1  i  S.  John  iii.  2.  3  S.  Luke  xxiii.  41. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


65 


would  not  be  misrepresented  if  it  were  described  as 
a  desire  that  God  should  come  in  and  make  Himself 
generally  useful  in  securing  the  pleasantness  of  this 
world  and  the  comfort  of  its  inhabitants.  The  amaze¬ 
ment,  indeed  we  may  say  the  shocked  and  indignant 
amazement,  of  such  people  that  God  should  allow  anyone 
to  suffer  as  many  suffered  during  the  war,  is  a  sufficient 
proof  that  their  conception  of  God  is  of  One  Whose 
first  duty  is  to  make  things  comfortable.  But  the  first 
task,  one  may  ever  say  the  first  duty,  of  a  God  of 
Holiness  is  not  to  make  people  comfortable  but  to  make 
them  holy.  And  for  that  we  must  seek  to  do  His 
will,  not  to  coerce  or  coax  or  cajole  Him  into  doing  ours. 
For,  as  an  old  friend  of  mine,  a  Wesleyan  local  preacher, 
who  used  to  preach  on  the  Open  Air  Market,  known  as 
the  “  Flat  Iron  Market  ”  by  Sacred  Trinity  Church, 
Salford,  once  beautifully  and  truly  said  “  God  is  the 
best  Master  in  the  world  but  He  will  be  Master.  If  He 
comes  into  your  heart,  where  He  wants  to  come,  He 
must  come  to  rule.” 


F 


66 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  VIII 

god’s  claim  to  be  master 

Did  we  not,  in  the  last  paragraph  of  last  chapter,  touch 
the  real  cause  of  failure,  disillusionment  and  disappoint¬ 
ment  in  religion  ?  “  God  is  the  best  Master  in  the  world, 
but  He  will  be  Master  ”  ;  and  in  every  age  there  have 
been  individuals,  and  nations,  who  have  desired  God's 
blessings  on  less  exacting  terms.  Well  !  they  are  not 
to  be  had  on  any  less  exacting  terms.  When  I  was  a 
little  boy  my  mother  used  to  read  me  stories  from  a  book 
of  lovely  allegories  for  children.  One  of  them  told 
of  a  great  sea  which  had  to  be  crossed  by  a  number  of 
boys  and  girls,  each  of  whom  had  to  cross  it  in  his  or 
her  own  boat.  In  the  boat  was  room  for  the  owner 
and  the  Pilot,  and  for  nothing  else.  If  a  child  wished 
to  keep  even  one  of  the  many-coloured  and  beautiful 
shells,  which  he  had  picked  up  on  the  shore  before 
embarking,  there  was  no  room  for  the  Pilot.  And  the 
story  described  the  struggles,  and  dangers,  and  all  but 
destruction,  of  one  boy  who  clung  to  one  last  dearly 
loved  rainbow- tinted  shell  which  prevented  the  Pilot 
from  sailing  with  him.  As  soon  as  I  was  old  enough 
to  leave  off  delighting  in  the  stories  simply  as  stories, 
and  to  think  of  their  meaning,  I  supposed  that  the 
coloured  shells  were  sins.  One  of  the  chief  lessons  of 
life  for  me  has  been  to  learn  that  other  things  besides 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


67 


sins  will  do  to  keep  the  Pilot  out  of  the  ship  or  (to  drop 
metaphor  and  allegory)  to  exclude  Christ  from  the  heart. 
There  must  be  nothing  which  we  put  before  Him. 
He  does  not  ask  us  to  give  up  all  for  Him.  He  does 
ask  us  us  to  have  nothing  which  we  would  not  be  willing 
to  surrender  at  His  word.  Surely  this  is  the  lesson  which 
confronts  us,  right  at  the  beginning  of  the  history  of 
personal  religion,  in  the  story  of  Abraham  on  the 
mountain  Jehovah-jireh  (Genises  xxii).  Not  Abraham’s 
own  son,  not  God’s  own  best  gift  to  Abraham,  must 
be  withheld,  or  allowed  to  occupy  in  his  heart  the  throne 
where  God  should  reign  alone.  If  anyone  complains 
that  this  is  a  hard,  austere,  repellant  doctrine,  presenting 
God  in  an  unlovely  and  unattractive  light,  I  might  be 
content  to  quote  our  Blessed  Lord’s  own  words  “  He  that 
loveth  father  or  mother  more  than  Me  is  not  worthy  of 
Me  ;  and  he  that  loveth  son  or  daughter  more  than 
Me  is  not  worthy  of  Me.” 1  But  I  do  not  need  to  take 
shelter,  as  it  were,  behind  any  quotation,  even  of  the 
words  of  Christ  Himself.  I  am  sure  the  religious 
conscience  of  any  man  who  thinks  seriously  will  lead 
him  to  see  both  that  it  is  true  that  God  will  allow  nothing 
to  occupy,  in  our  hearts,  the  place  that  should  be  His, 
and  also  why  this  is  true.  It  is  because  God  Himself  is, 
beyond  everything  else,  and  beyond  all  comparison, 
our  chief  and  best  good,  and  our  Heavenly  Father 
in  His  love  will  not  allow  us  to  rest  content  with  any¬ 
thing  but  the  very  best.  Once,  when  I  had  been  preach¬ 
ing  on  this  subject  a  very  famous  soldier  told  me  a 
story  afterwards  which  serves  as  a  very  good  illustration. 
He  said  that  when  he  was  at  school  he  was  expecting 

1 S.  Matt.  x.  37. 


68 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


to  be  Captain  of  cricket.  And  it  was  a  school  to  be 
cricket  captain  of  which  would  have  been  an  honour  for 
life.  And  then,  just  before  the  cricket  season  opened, 
his  father  took  him  away  from  school  and  put  him  with 
a  private  tutor.  “  I  simply  could  not  believe  it  ”  he 
said  to  me.  “I  could  not  believe  that  my  father 
could  be  so  cruel.  Just  for  a  little  laziness,  a  little 
neglect  of  my  books,  to  punish  me  so  savagely,  and 
to  take  away  the  one  thing  I  most  desired.  It  seemed 
too  cruel.  At  first  I  could  hardly  believe  it.  And  it 
was  ten  years  before  the  bitterness  died  out  of  my  heart. 
But,  thank  God,  before  the  old  man  died  I  was  able  to 
tell  him  that  I  knew  he  had  done  right,  and  to  thank 
him  for  having  done  it.”  Of  course  the  father  was  right. 
He  saw  his  boy  neglecting  his  work,  and  endangering 
his  career  for  the  sake  of  a  game,  a  passing  honour, 
a  coloured  ciicket  cap.  And  he  loved  the  boy  too  well, 
too  unselfishly,  to  allow  it.  It  must  have  been  hard  for 
the  father,  himself  a  member  of  the  same  famous  school, 
to  deprive  his  son  of  the  honour,  and  harder  still  to  see 
the  boy  hard  and  angry  and  resentful.  But  he  loved 
his  son  too  well  to  let  him  choose  anything  but  the 
highest  and  best  good.  Even  so  God  often  takes  what 
we  most  desire,  the  one  thing  on  which  our  heart  is 
fixed,  saying  clearly  to  us  “  Son  ....  behold  I  take 
away  from  thee  the  desire  of  thine  eyes  with  a  stroke,” 1 
and  we  are  tempted  to  doubt  whether  He  can  indeed 
be  a  loving  Father,  and  to  think  Him  cruel  and  hard, 
and  to  nourish,  perhaps  for  years,  bitterness  and  resent¬ 
ment  against  Him.  Well  for  us  if,  before  we  die,  we 
are  able  to  tell  God  that  we  are  sure  He  was  right,  and 


1  Ezekiel  xxiv.  16. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


69 


to  thank  Him  for  what  He  did.  Better  still  if  there 
is  no  time  of  bitterness  and  shaken  faith  but  if,  from  the 
very  first,  we  are  able  to  trust  Him  and,  even  in  the 
darkest  hour,  to  cry  “  Though  He  slay  me,  yet  will  I 
trust  in  Him.”1 

One  thing  that  adds  to  the  difficulty  of  thus  trusting 
the  love  and  wisdom  of  God  is  that  we  often  feel  that 
what  God  has  done  is  really  producing  harm  not  good. 
We  do  not  say,  in  plain  and  bald  language,  “  If  God 
knew  what  was  for  the  best  as  well  as  I  do  He  would 
never  have  acted  as  He  has,”  but  that  is  what  it  comes 
to.  That  He  should  ask  us  to  give  up  our  sins  for  His 
sake  is  no  more  than  what  is  right  and  natural,  we  feel. 
That  even  good  and  harmless  things,  health  and  comfort 
and  pleasure,  should  sometimes  have  to  be  surrendered 
may,  we  think,  be  reasonable.  But  why  should  men 
and  women,  zealous  in  His  service  and  doing  good  to 
thousands,  be  taken  away  by  premature  death,  or 
rendered  useless  by  wasting  sickness  ?  Above  all  why 
should  young  men  of  ability  and  of  promise  be  cut  off 
before  they  have  had  time  to  do  one  hour  of  service 
in  the  vineyard  of  this  world  ?  To  such  questions 
there  is  but  one  answer.  It  is  an  answer  which 
to  the  world  seems,  and  must  always  seem,  no  answer 
at  all,  and  which,  on  the  contrary,  to  the  man  who 
knows  God  will  always  seem  absolutely  adequate. 
It  is  the  answer  that  our  Heavenly  Father  must  know 
best,  that  He  desires  nothing  but  our  highest  good, 
and  that  if  we  will  trust  Him  we  shall  not  be  left  long 
without  assuring  proof.  And  the  man  who  is  prepared 
to  trust  God  has  at  any  rate  this  advantage  over  the 

1  Job  xiii.  15. 


70 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


worldly  minded  man  that  whereas  the  latter  gets 
nothing  but  bitterness  of  heart,  and  wretchedness  of 
days,  from  his  rebellion  and  anger  against  God,  the 
child  of  God  gets  great  consolation  and  peace,  the  peace 
of  God  which  passes  all  understanding. 

Some  time  ago,  in  a  big  city  church  in  which  I  was 
preaching  a  course  of  Lenten  midday  sermons,  I  spoke 
of  how  S.  Paul  had  been  tried  and  tested  by  God. 
After  he  had  given  up  all  for  Christ,  as  he  hoped  and 
believed,  God  asked  of  him  yet  further  proofs  of  his 
whole-hearted  devotion.  He  whose  sole  desire  was 
to  preach  the  gospel  had  to  lie,  weary  j^ear  after  weary 
year,  in  prison  first  in  Caesarea  and  then  in  Rome. 
He  who  had  no  thought  for  anything  but  the  extension 
of  his  Master’s  Kingdom  had  to  hear  of  defections,  and 
of  fallings  away,  and  of  the  spread  of  heresies,  and, 
himself  inactive,  to  know  that  his  foes,  and  the  foes  of 
the  Gospel,  were  active.  And,  hardest  of  all  perhaps  to 
poor  human  nature,  he  whose  desire  was  to  be  “  charge¬ 
able  to  no  man,”  1  and  whose  boast  it  is  that  “  these 
hands  have  ministered  to  my  necessities,” 2  has  to 
become  a  pensioner  and  to  live  on  alms.  And  we 
know,  from  the  bright,  serene,  happy  Epistle  to  the 
Philippians  how  nobly  he  responded  to  God’s  call. 
And,  speaking  of  all  this,  I  said  that  God  often  asked 
us  to  give  up  that  in  which  we  most  delighted  and, 
instead  of  having  the  glory  of  doing  great  things  for 
Him,  to  learn,  in  patience  and  humility,  that  while 
God  uses  our  services  He  needs  not  them  but  us.  After 
the  service  a  clergyman  who,  before  he  had  a  terrible 

1  2  Cor.  xi.  9  ;  i  Thess  ii.  g  ;  and  2  Thess.  iii.  8. 

2  Acts  xx.  34. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


7i 


accident,  had  been  one  of  the  most  capable,  zealous, 
and  untiring  of  workers,  wrote  to  me  and  said  "  What 
you  said  yesterday  was  true.  I  used  to  pride  myself 
on  my  powers  of  work  for  God’s  Church.  Since  He 
called  on  me  to  be  an  invalid  for  His  sake  I  have  done 
less,  but  I  think  I  have  prayed  more.  Not  perhaps  a 
bad  exchange.  He  knows  best  what  is  good  for  each 
of  us." 

I  do  not  say,  for  I  do  not  think,  that  it  is  an  easy 
matter  thus  to  trust  God.  Least  of  all  is  it  easy  when 
it  is  not  upon  ourselves  but  upon  someone  we  love, 
that  the  discipline  falls.  But  then  I  do  not  think 
I  ever  made  the  mistake  of  supposing  that  religion 
was  easy,  or  the  salvation  of  a  soul  a  light  task.  If 
there  is  any  truth  in  Christianity  at  all ;  if  man’s 
salvation  could  be  achieved  by  nothing  less  than  the 
death  of  the  Son  of  God  Himself  on  Calvary  ;  if  the 
whole  great  drama  of  the  Incarnation,  the  Atonement, 
the  Resurrection  and  Ascension,  and  the  Mission  of  the 
Holy  Ghost  is  rendered  credible  by  the  greatness  of  the 
task  set  before  God  by  the  need  for  man’s  redemption 
— and  if  that  task  was  not  a  great  one  the  whole  story  of 
God  made  Man  for  man’s  sake  is  utterly  incredible — 
then  what  right  have  we  to  suppose  that  man’s  own 
private  individual  effort  will  be  a  light  and  easy  one  ? 
I  want  to  stress  the  greatness  of  the  task,  the  importance 
and  magnitude  of  what  God  asks  of  us  not  only  because 
I  am  sure  that  that  is  the  teaching  of  the  New  Testament 
— which  always  speaks  of  the  Christian  life  as  one  of 
joy^indeed,  but  of  the  joy  of  effort,  and  struggle,  and 
self  denial,  and  victory  long  delayed  and  hardly  attained 
— but  because  I  am  sure  it  is  the  best  way  of  attracting 


72 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


disciples.  Our  presentation  of  the  Gospel  to-day 
lacks  a  breath  of  sternness,  of  austerity,  and  so  generous 
hearted  young  men  and  women  turn — and,  if  Christianity 
as  it  is  too  often  presented  is  all  that  the  religion  of 
Christ  has  it  in  it  to  be,  rightly  turn — to  socialism,  or  the 
teaching  of  Nietzsche,  or  to  one  or  other  of  the  new 
schemes  of  life  and  of  thought  which  call  for  some  effort 
and  offer  some  rewards  of  battle.  But  there  is  no  need 
to  turn  away  from  the  old  faith  and  there  is  to-day, 
as  there  was  when  first  it  was  asked,  but  one  answer 
to  the  question  “  Art  Thou  He  that  should  come,  or 
look  we  for  another  ?  ”  1  and  that  is  the  answer  of 
experience.  Let  anyone  try  really  to  live  the  Christ- 
life  and  he  will  find  that  it  makes  demands  enough  on 
every  part  of  man’s  nature,  and  yields  fruit  enough 
to  content  the  most  exacting. 

And  the  reason  for  God’s  dealings  with  us  is  not 
really  far  to  seek  or  hard  to  understand.  Let  us  state 
the  matter,  as  it  were,  argumentatively.  Either  man  is 
immortal  or  he  is  not.  If  he  is  not,  if  the  individual 
does  not  live  again,  then  there  is  no  meaning  in  life 
at  all.  Life  is  nothing  but 

"  a  tale 

Told  by  an  idiot,  full  of  sound  and  fury 
Signifying  nothing.” 

But  if  man  is  an  immortal  spirit,  so  that  there  lies 
before  him  an  eternity  of  joyful  activity  in  the  service 
of  God,  then  the  real  significance  of  this  life  only  becomes 
apparent  when  we  recognise  it  as  a  school  of  character 
in  which  we  are  trained  for  the  fuller  life  beyond  the 
grave.  This,  of  course,  is  quite  frankly  and  explicitly 

1 S.  Luke  vii.  19. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


73 


“  other-worldliness,"  and  it  is  a  doctrine  which  before 
the  war  aroused  violent  and  scornful  opposition.  Again 
and  again  we  clergy  were  told,  quite  plainly  and 
explicitly  in  words,  and  even  more  plainly  and  explicitly 
in  men's  actions  and  in  their  whole  attitude  to  life  and 
to  religion,  that  we  should  not  bother  about  getting 
people  into  Heaven  but  should  try  to  make  a  Heaven  of 
this  world.  Well  between  1914  and  1918 — yes  and 
since  the  Armistice  too — we  have  seen  what  sort  of  a 
Heaven  men  produce  when  they  forget  God  and  the 
apostolic  injunction  to  “  set  your  affection  on  things 
above  not  on  things  on  the  earth." 1  A  life  without 
God,  a  life  of  self  seeking  instead  of  mutual  service,  a 
life  where  a  man’s  happiness  is  sought  in  things  possessed 
rather  than  in  spiritual  goods  enjoyed,  this  is  an  utterly 
unnatural  life,  and  pursued  on  a  large  scale  can  only 
produce  a  diseased  state  in  the  whole  of  human  society. 
And  what  has  been  denounced  as  “  other  worldliness  " 
is  really  an  attempt  to  look  facts  in  the  face  and  to  see 
man  as  he  really  is,  namely  as  a  spiritual  being  in  the 
making,  preparing  for  an  Eternity  of  joyful  co-operation 
with  God,  the  source  of  all  good. 

And  this  view  of  the  present  world  as  a  school  or 
training  ground  of  souls,  having  as  its  supreme  end 
and  aim  the  production  of  noble  character,  is  the  only 
one  which  offers  us  a  satisfactory  key  to  the  various 
puzzles  and  problems  of  daily  life.  Imagine  a  visitor 
being  shewn  over  a  school,  and  supposing  that  the  sole 
object  of  the  school  was  either  (a)  the  immediate 
pleasure  and  happiness  of  the  children,  or  ( b )  the 
production  of  the  greatest  possible  number  of  perfect 

*  Col.  iii.  2. 


74 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


copy-books  and  well  finished  drawings,  or  ( c )  the  increased 
reputation  of  the  school  as  one  that  won  scholarships 
at  the  universities.  How  puzzled  such  a  man  would  be. 
If  immediate  pleasure  is  the  object,  why  make  the 
children  do  tasks  they  don’t  like,  and  above  all  why 
punish  them  ?  If  perfect  results  are  what  is  desired 
why  don’t  the  teachers  take  the  copy-books  and  drawing 
boards  out  of  the  children’s  feeble  unskilled  hands 
and  do  the  work  themselves  ?  If  the  greatest  possible 
number  of  university  successes  is  what  is  aimed  at 
why  not  concentrate  on  the  few  clever  boys  and  not 
waste  time  and  effort  on  the  dull  ones  ?  It  is  only  when 
we  realize  the  true  aim  of  the  true  schoolmaster,  which 
is  to  give  to  every  single  boy  the  best  possible  preparation 
for  the  wider  life  which  awaits  him  when  school  is  done, 
that  everything  in  the  school  day  becomes  intelligible. 
So  to  with  this  world  and  God.  We  wonder  why  a 
loving  Father  allows  pain  and  trial,  and  why  He 
permits  stupid  men  to  bungle  His  plans  for  the  world  and 
wicked  men  to  run  counter  to  them — instead  of  force- 
ably  taking  things  out  of  man's  hands  and  doing  them 
Himself — and  above  all  why  He  is  so  long  suffering 
and  patient  with  the  stupid,  and  the  lazy,  and  the  selfish, 
and  the  cruel,  and  the  wicked.  Only  when  we  realize 
that  this  world  is  a  school,  and  that  God  is  our  infinitely 
wise  and  patient  Schoolmaster,  Who  seeks  “  to  cultivate 
an  infinite  number  of  souls  ”  and  Who  is  “  gracious 
and  merciful,  slow  to  anger,  and  of  great  kindness,”  1 
do  we  understand  the  world.  And  as  soon  as  we  see 
the  world  as  a  school  we  hear  God  calling  us  to  help 
Him  in  the  work,  to  be  as  it  were  pupil  teachers  under 
Him,  “  fellow  helpers  to  the  truth.” 2 

1  Joel  ii.  13.  2  3  S.  John  8. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


75 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE  DISCIPLINE  OF  DAILY  LIFE 

So,  if  the  line  of  thought  pursued  in  this  book  is  correct, 
we  have  something  which  it  will  not  perhaps  be  pre¬ 
sumptuous  to  call  a  philosophy  of  life.  Man,  we  believe, 
is  made  for  God,  made  in  His  likeness  and  for  union 
with  Him.  But  if  we  are  made  in  His  likeness,  and  if 
we  are  to  share  His  life,  we  are  made  for  a  life  of  love,  of 
service,  of  giving.  And  just  as  God  has  nothing  to 
give  hut  Himself,  so  that  for  the  wicked  man,  who  has 
lost  the  power  to  desire  or  to  enjoy  God,  there  truly 
is  no  Heaven,  so  we  have  nothing  to  give  but  ourselves, 
and  so  much  of  God  as  is  in  us.  Hence  man’s  true 
life  is  the  life  of  service,  and  the  highest  and  noblest 
service  he  can  render  is  to  pass  on  to  others  the  life  of 
God  which  he  himself  enjoys.  To  be  the  clearest 
and  most  unclouded  window,  through  which  the  radiance 
of  God's  countenance  may  shine  unhindered  upon  others  ; 
to  be  a  wide  and  unblocked  pipe  through  which  the 
healing  waters  of  "  the  Ocean  that  is  God  ”  can  flow 
unhindered  to  the  whole  world,  that  is  man’s  highest 
good.  When  Elisha  said  to  Elijah  “  I  pray  thee,  let  a 
double  portion  of  thy  spirit  be  upon  me  "  1  it  is  no  wonder 
that  the  elder  prophet  said  “  Thou  hast  asked  a  hard 
thing,”  for  he  had  asked,  not  that  he  might  be  a  greater 


1  2  Kings  ii.  9. 


76 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


man  than  his  master  but  that  his  power  to  serve  God 
and  his  fellowmen,  let  it  be  what  it  might  be,  might  in 
the  future  be  doubled.  And  that  is  at  once  a  hard 
task  and  the  task  to  which  all  men  are  called.  Indeed 
we  may  say  that  man's  whole  task  is  summed  up  in 
these  two  duties,  namely  more  and  more  perfect  sur¬ 
render  to  God  and  more  and  more  unstinted  service 
of  man.  And  this  is  not  merely  man’s  duty  but  his 
highest  happiness  and  good.  The  two  sides  of  his  duty 
are  also  the  two  sides  of  his  joy.  We  might  fancy  that 
to  lose  oneself  in  God,  to  make  an  entire  surrender  to 
Him,  to  be  forced  to  say  “  I  am  crucified  with  Christ  "  1 
would  be  giving  up  some  of  the  joy,  some  of  the  fulness 
of  life.  That  it  is  hard,  difficult  to  do,  a  thing  weak 
human  nature  shrinks  from,  no  one  will  deny.  We 
want  to  “be  ourselves  "  and  to  “  live  our  own  lives.” 
We  fear  to  surrender  ourselves  unreservedly  to  God, 
we  say  to  Him  “  I  feared  Thee,  because  Thou  art  an 
austere  man  :  Thou  takest  up  that  Thou  layedst  not 
down,  and  reapest  that  Thou  didst  not  sow,” a  and 
standing  on  the  brink  of  “  the  Ocean  that  is  God  ” 
we  hesitate  to  make  the  plunge.  This  fear  of  God, 
quite  apart  from  love  for  any  sin  that  might  hold  us  back ; 
this  fear  of  His  immensity ;  this  clinging  to  the  tiny 
shell  of  our  “  self-hood  ”  ;  this  is  a  thing  known  to  all 
the  mystics.  And  yet  till  the  plunge  is  made  there  is 
no  real  happiness,  and  when  it  is  made  there  is  “  fulness 
of  joy  .  .  .  pleasure  for  evermore.”  3  All  the  saints 
in  all  the  ages  have  borne  witness  to  this  but  I  will 
adduce  the  evidence  of  two  friends,  whose  testimony 
to  God  I  have  already  made  use  of  in  this  book.  The 

1  Gal.  ii.  20.  2  S.  Luke  xix.  21.  8  Psalm  xvi.  12. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


77 


young  officer  in  the  Flying  Corps,  quoted  in  Chapter 
IV,  had  a  wonderfully  full  and  interesting  life  before 
his  conversion,  and  baptism  at  the  age  of  about  twenty- 
seven.  Yet  he  said  to  me,  some  years  after,  “  I  never 
knew  what  it  was  to  be  a  man,  till  I  found  God."  And 
the  old  Wesleyan  local  preacher,  quoted  at  the  end  of 
Chapter  VII,  once  declared  in  an  open-air  sermon, 
“  Brothers  it  just  comes  to  this  :  God  just  suits  me. 
Aye,  and  I  suit  Him,  for  His  Nature  and  His  Name  is 
Love."  In  both  cases  God  has  “  shewn  them  the  path 
of  life  "  and  in  His  presence  they  had  found  “  the  fulness 
of  joy  .  .  .  .  pleasure  for  evermore." 

And  if  we  may  truly  say  that  the  first  half  of  man’s 
duty,  namely  entire  surrender  to  God,  is  his  highest 
joy,  we  may  with  equal  truth  say  exactly  the  same  of  the 
other  half  of  his  duty,  namely  the  duty  of  unstinting 
service  of  man.  When  our  Saviour  said  “  It  is  more 
blessed  to  give  than  to  receive,”  1  He  did  not  mean 
that  it  was  more  truly  virtuous,  religious,  and  proper. 
He  meant  what  He  said,  that  it  was  ever  so  much  nicer, 
pleasanter,  more  enjoyable  and  jollier. 

Going  back  then  to  what  we  said  in  the  first  chapter 
we  see  how  silly  are  those  people  who  either  try  to  do 
good  without  striving  to  be  good,  or  who  fuss  about 
being  good,  without  striving  at  the  same  time  to  do 
good.  The  first  are  like  men  who  rush  out  to  succour 
those  dying  of  hunger  and  thirst  and,  with  the  utmost 
goodwill,  press  upon  them  empty  plates  and  dry  and 
dusty  drinking  cups.  The  second  are  like  people  so 
busy  packing  hampers  of  food  for  the  starving,  and 
trying  to  fill  more  full,  cups  and  bottles  already  over¬ 
flowing,  that  they  never  even  start  for  the  famine  area. 


78 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


Let  us,  remembering  the  phrase  already  quoted,  “  Saved 
to  Serve,”  pray  and  strive  to  avoid  both  mistakes.  A 
few  practical  suggestions  may  be  helpful. 

I  am  quite  certain — I  grow  more  and  more  certain 
every  day — that  only  by  being  holy,  only  by  real  moral 
goodness  which  has  its  roots  in  the  knowledge  and  love 
of  God,  can  we  truly  serve  our  fellow  men.  But  you 
need  not  wait  till  you  are  perfect  in  holiness  before  you 
begin  to  serve.  Indeed  if  you  try  to  do  so  you  will 
soon  cease  to  make  any  progress  yourself.  Each  gift 
of  God’s  Grace  must  be  used  as  it  is  given,  so  that  room 
may  be  made  in  your  heart  for  more.  As  grace  is 
spent  it  creates  a  need  which  God  hastens  to  supply 
with  fresh  outpourings.  Solvitur  ambulando,  the 
problem  of  the  religious  life  is  solved  in  living  that  life. 
Every  advance  you  make  in  the  knowledge  of  God,  or 
in  power  of  prayer,  or  in  mastery  of  self,  should  lead  to 
some  corresponding  advance  in  service.  And  every 
piece  of  service,  well  and  truly  done,  will  not  merely 
confirm  and  strengthen  your  faith,  and  give  you  increased 
power  in  the  use  of  spiritual  weapons,  and  more  mastery 
over  all  your  powers  of  body,  mind  and  soul,  but  will 
also  force  you  to  make  increased  calls  upon  God,  calls  to 
which  He  will  hasten  to  respond.  Two  sayings  of  S. 
Paul’s  may  supply  us  here  with  suitable  meditations. 
They  are  “To  them  who,  by  patient  continuance  in 
well  being  seek  for  glory  and  honour,  and  immortality, 
God  will  render  eternal  life  ” 1  and  “  Having  therefore 
these  promises,  dearly  beloved,  let  us  cleanse  ourselves 
from  all  filthiness  of  the  flesh  and  spirit,  perfecting 
holiness  in  the  fear  of  God."  2 
1  Rom.  ii.  7. 


*  2  Cor.  vii.  1. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


79 


Keeping  then  clearly  before  us  these  two  ideas  of 
patient  continuance  in  well  doing,  and  of  steady  growth 
in  personal  holiness,  let  us  consider  the  question  of 
service.  Service,  like  charity,  should  “  begin  at  home.” 
I  and  my  brothers  and  sister  were  happy,  in  our  child¬ 
hood’s  days,  in  the  services  of  an  old  family  nurse,  and 
she  had  many  expressions  full  of  homely  wisdom.  One 
was  a  charge  of  “  keeping  our  pretty  looks  for  strangers.” 
Does  the  reader  keep  his  or  her  pretty  looks  for 
strangers,  forgetting  the  duties  of  religion  in  the  home  ? 
Dickens  knew  human  nature  when  he  drew  Mrs.  Jelly  by 
whose  fine  eyes  could  not  see  anything  nearer  than 
Africa,  and  “  the  very  contentious  gentleman,  who  said 
it  was  his  mission  to  be  everybody’s  brother,  but  who 
appeared  to  be  on  terms  of  coolness  with  the  whole  of  his 
large  family.  ’  ’  But  the  varied  relationships  of  the  family 
are  ordained  by  God.  The  family  and  not  the  individual 
is  the  true  unity  of  which  the  edifice  of  society  is  built. 
And  no  country  or  nation  can  be  great  or  prosperous  or 
happy  where  the  Home  decays.  And  only  clergy, 
perhaps,  are  in'a  position  to  estimate  to  the  full  the  wide¬ 
spread,  and  utterly  needless,  misery  and  wretchedness 
caused  by  selfishness  at  home.  It  would  be  easy  to  fill 
a  book,  and  a  big  book  too,  with  examples,  drawn  from 
my  own  experience,  of  what  home  life  can  be  where  all 
the  members  are  “  kindly  affectioned  one  to  another 
.  ...  in  honour  preferring  one  another,”1  and  on  the 
other  hand  of  the  utter  misery  which  comes  in  with 
selfishness.  In  the  family  of  the  first  type  we  have  the 
best  picture  of  the  life  of  Heaven,  the  life  of  God  Himself, 
that  earth  affords.  Such  a  home  was  painted  for  me, 

1  Rom.  xii.  10. 


8o 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


by  a  young  married  friend,  in  words  which  make  perhaps 
the  best  sermon  on  married  life  I  have  ever  heard. 
Explaining  to  me  how,  since  they  were  married  and  the 
children  came,  he  and  his  wife  could  not  get  out  so  much 
to  the  pictures,  or  the  theatre,  he  said  “  Its  worth  it. 
If  we  have  less  pleasure,  we  have  more  happiness.” 
And  in  the  family  of  the  second  type  we  can  see,  at 
work  and  yielding  their  natural  and  inevitable  fruit, 
all  the  causes  which  make  the  squalor  and  misery  of  our 
great  towns,  and  the  anarchy  of  our  social  and  industrial 
life,  and  the  turmoil  of  a  war-broken  and  war-terrified 
world.  The  home  is  at  once  the  natural  school  of  the 
Christian  virtues,  and  the  first  place  in  which  they  must 
be  exercised  and  displayed. 

Indeed  it  cannot  be  expected  that  we  shall  solve  the 
giant  problems  of  the  city,  the  state,  and  the  world — 
which  are  themselves  wholly  and  entirely  moral  problems 
in  reality,  however  much  we  may  pretend  that  they  are 
economic  and  social  problems,  and  so  beyond  man’s 
control — till  we  have  made  a  much  more  earnest  effort, 
and  attained  a  much  greater  degree  of  success,  in  the 
solution  of  the  moral  problems  of  the  individual  and  the 
home.  People  sometimes  ask  me  if  I  think  we  shall  ever 
abolish  war,  and  whether  I  think  England  should 
at  once  sink  all  her  battleships  and  disband  her  army. 
But  surely  that  is  to  begin  at  the  wrong  end,  and  to 
try  to  run  before  we  can  walk  or  even  before  we  can  stand 
steady  on  our  feet.  Before  we  can  hope  to  abolish  war 
we  must  see  some  real  effort,  on  the  part  of  many  men 
and  women,  to  put  Christ’s  maxim  “  Resist  not  evil  ” 1 
into  practice  in  private  life.  There  are  two  things 

1  S.  Matt.  v.  39. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


81 


which  cannot  be  too  often  insisted  on.  The  first  is  that 
the  teaching  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  not  an 
Interimethik,  meant  for  those  who,  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
falsely  supposed,  would  see  the  Last  Day  very  shortly, 
but  quite  unsuited  for  the  work-a-day  world  of  to-day, 
nor  a  collection  of  striking  eastern  paradoxes  which 
we  do  well  to  ignore.  The  doctrine  of  the  Sermon  on 
the  Mount  is  the  teaching  of  One  Who  “  knew  all  men, 
and  needed  not  that  any  should  testify  of  man  ;  for 
He  knew  what  was  in  man.” 1  Hence  it  is  a  real  guide 
to,  and  perfectly  adapted  for,  man  as  he  should  be,  and 
as  he  will  be  when  he  has  been  perfected.  But  the 
second  thing  is  that  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount  is  not  a 
series  of  rule-of-thumb  maxims  which  can  be  put  into 
practice  by  any  selfish,  cruel,  and  lustful  man  to  his 
own  advantage,  and  that  of  others.  To  conjure  with 
Christ’s  rod  you  must  be  one  of  His  disciples,  and  to 
live  successfully  by  His  doctrine  you  must  be  trying  to 
drink  of  His  cup  and  to  be  baptized  with  the  baptism 
which  He  is  baptized  with.”  3  Any  one  can  prove  both 
these  truths  for  himself  quite  easily.  Let  the  reader 
try  loving  his  enemy  (treating,  that  is  to  say,  someone 
who  has  behaved  badly  as  if  he  had  behaved  well),  or 
turning  the  other  cheek,  or  insisting  on  giving  some  selfish 
and  grasping  person,  who  always  grabs  more  than  his 
share,  more  even  than  he  has  claimed,  or  in  any  other 
way  refusing  to  resist  evil  or  trust  in  force  and  in  punish¬ 
ment.  Immediately  he  will  learn  two  things.  First 
he  will  realize  that  he  has  behaved  in  a  perfectly  natural 
and  rational  way  and  that  what  he  has  done  is  not  a 

1  S.  John  ii.  25. 

2  S.  Matt.  xx.  22. 


82 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


surprising  effort  of  virtue,  but  something  which  entirely 
suits  him  and  is  its  own  reward.  And  secondly  he  will 
learn  that  if  he  fails  the  failure  has  been  wholly  his 
own,  never  the  failure  of  the  principles  he  has  been  trying 
to  put  into  practice.  There  are  times  when,  in  the 
management  of  my  Lads'  Club,  or  Lads'  Whitweek 
Camp,  or  large  and  somewhat  turbulent  Ragged  School 
class,  I  can  be  a  true  “  Christian  Anarchist,"  refusing 
to  use  rules  and  punishments  and  force.  That  is 
when  I  am  myself  at  my  best.  There  are  other  times 
when  these  methods  fail.  But  I  know,  and  all  who  have 
tried  similar  experiments  know,  that  the  failure  is  in 
me,  not  in  the  boys.  I  don’t  say  the  boys  have  not 
behaved  badly  in  the  second  case.  Very  likely  they 
behaved  badly  in  the  first.  But  evil  has  no  real  power 
against  good.  Good  is  always  stronger  than  evil. 
When  evil  conquers  it  is  because  we  have  been  “  over¬ 
come  of  evil "  instead  of  “  overcoming  evil  with  good."  1 
But  there  is  nothing  that  will  save  the  world  but  the 
teaching  of  Jesus  Christ  put  into  practice  on  a  wide 
scale.  And  the  first  and  highest  duty  of  every  man  is 
to  train  and  exercise  himself  to  be  an  exponent  of 
Christ’s  methods,  and  to  do  so  by  practising  those 
methods  immediately,  to-day  and  during  the  coming 
week,  and  so  on  all  through  life,  in  the  immediate 
circle  in  which  God  has  placed  him,  firstly  in  the  home, 
and  after  that  in  ever  widening  spheres.  And  we  may 
all  be  assured  that  as  we  become  more  expert,  and  our 
powers  are  more  and  more  developed,  God  will — if 
He  thinks  fit — provide  a  wider  stage  on  which  we  may 
play  our  part.  Though  we  are  by  no  means  the  best 

1  Rom.  xii.  21. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


83 


judges  as  to  what  constitutes  the  most  important 
and  influential  sphere.  Carlisle,  in  his  French  Revolution 
says  that  viewed  from  the  fixed  stars  the  France  which 
Louis  XV.  wTas  ruining  might  well  look  no  bigger  than 
any  backyard,  or  farm  midden,  on  which  some  private 
person,  the  reader  perhaps,  is  dealing  unjustly  and 
living  ill.  The  thought  is  a  profoundly  true  one. 
In  the  eyes  of  God  any  plain  honest  man,  dealing  justly 
behind  a  counter,  or  in  a  warehouse,  and  living  in 
kindness  with  his  neighbours,  or  any  devoted  working- 
class  mother  cooking,  cleaning,  baking,  washing,  mending 
and  nursing  for  a  large  family,  and  bringing  them  up  to 
be  honest,  kindly,  God-fearing  men  and  women,  may  be 
doing  not  only  a  better  but  a  more  important  work 
than  the  Prime  Minister  of  a  great  country,  or  the 
General  over  vast  armies. 

The  point  is  this.  You  want  to  serve  your  fellowmen 
and  to  do  some  good  in  the  world  ?  Well  and  good  ! 
But  are  you  trained  for  your  part  in  God's  great  war 
against  evil.  Have  you  learned  to  use  the  weapons  of 
your  spiritual  combat  by  daily  practice  on  the  field — 
seemingly  narrow  but  quite  ^road  enough  for  your 
needs — of  daily  duties  ?  Or  are  you  day  dreaming  of 
the  great  things  you  would  do,  if  you  had  the  chance, 
while  the  daily  opportunities  slip  past  you  ?  Above  all, 
is  it  possible  that  you  are  so  misusing  the  time  of  training 
that,  if  and  when  the  great  opportunity  comes,  you  will 
be  found  unfit  to  embrace  it. 

The  only  obstacle  to  a  better  world  is  the  lack  of 
a  great  many  more,  and  a  great  many  better,  servants 
of  God. 


84 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  POWER  OF  GOD  UNTO  SALVATION 

I  can  imagine  that  many  of  my  readers,  especially 
among  young  people,  full  of  generous  enthusiasm, 
anxious  to  be  up  and  doing,  and  keen  to  abolish  the 
cruelties,  inequalities  and  stupidities  of  our  present 
system,  will  have  read  so  far  with  no  little  impatience. 
“  We  want,”  they  will  feel  inclined  to  cry,  “  to  live 
for  others,  and  you  do  nothing  but  repeat  the  old 
maxims,  aye,  the  old  catchwords  of  personal  religion. 
You  bid  us  think  wholly  of  ourselves  and  our 
own  souls,  when  we  want  to  think  and  work  onlv 
for  others,  and  would  willingly  lose  even  our 
own  souls,  if  so  we  could  improve  the  world  ;  saying, 
with  St.  Paul  ‘  I  could  wish  that  myself  were  accursed 
from  Christ  for  my  brethren,  my  kinsmen  according  to 
the  flesh.’  ” 1  Now  certainly  I  have  laid  great  stress 
on  the  need  for  personal  holiness  because  the  passage  I 
have  chosen  for  the  motto  for  this  book  does  really 
represent  my  deepest  conviction.  I  am  convinced 
that  we  shall  not  get  a  better  world,  nay  I  will  go  further 
and  say  that  I  am  convinced  that  God  does  not  mean  us 
to  get  a  better  world,  except  by  becoming  better  men. 


1  i  Cor.  vii.  31. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


85 


For  what  God  cares  most  about  is  immortal  souls, 
human  characters,  which  abide  for  ever,  not  a  world 
the  fashion  of  which  passeth  away.  But  I  would 
not  have  anyone  suppose  that  I  am  indifferent  to  social 
reform  or  without  faith  in  man’s  power  to  bring  in 
a  better  state  of  things  Rather  I  am  sure  that  the 
present  interest  in  social  questions,  the  deep  sense  of 
the  evils  of  our  civilization,  of  its  cruelty,  and  ugliness, 
and  wastefulness,  are  inspired  by  God.  And  I  am  sure 
that  we  could  make  this  world  a  happy  and  beautiful 
place  if  we  were  really  in  earnest.  But  I  have  absolutely 
no  belief  in  the  view  that  this  can  be  attained  by  some 
external  change  of  what  my  many  young  socialist 
friends  call  "  the  System.”  I  can  quite  see  the  attrac¬ 
tions  of  this  view.  If  you  declare,  as  a  thing  clearly 
axiomatic,  that  nobody  can  be  a  Christian  under  a 
competitive  system,  you  thereby  absolve  yourself 
from  the  obligation  of  making  the  effort.  If  you  place 
all  the  blame  of  our  present  failures  to  the  credit,  or 
rather  discredit,  of  "  the  System  ”  you  have  an  explana¬ 
tion  of  them  much  less  galling  to  one’s  pride  than  if 
you  place  the  blame  on  yourself  and  men  and  women 
like  you.  Above  all,  to  youth,  which  is  always  hasty 
and  impatient,  it  is  much  pleasanter  to  believe  that 
evil  can  be  abolished,  and  Utopia  brought  in,  by  changing 
that  vague  and  indefinite  thing  “  the  System  ” — to 
change  which  might,  we  think,  be  quite  quickly  and 
easily  effected,  say  at  the  next  General  Election — than 
t  is  to  look  for  the  desired  end  along  the  tedious  paths 
of  moral  improvement.  But  I  do  not  believe  that  any 
system,  whether  of  National  Socialism,  Guild  Socialism, 
Communism,  or  anything  else  would  work  while  the 


86 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


bulk  of  men  and  women  are  fierce,  greedy,  and  lustful. 
All  such  efforts  have  always  broken  down  in  the  past, 
from  the  days  of  the  first  Christian  community  in  Jeru¬ 
salem  to  our  own  day,  for  the  fully  sufficient  reason 
that  men  and  women  were  not  good  enough  for  them . 
And  they  will  always  break  down  in  the  future  till  we 
have  better  men  and  women.  To  put  the  matter 
quite  bluntly,  God  does  not  mean  us  to  have  the  rewards 
of  happiness  and  comfort  except  on  His  conditions  of 
moral  improvement. 

But  there  is  no  reason  why  we  should  not  have  better 
men  and  women.  When,  as  a  young  man,  I  used  to  air 
my  socialistic  schemes  for  a  perfect  world  old  Tory 
friends  used  to  shake  wise  heads  and  say  “All  that 
sounds  very  nice,  my  boy,  but  I  am  afraid  it  would 
never  work.  You  will  find  you  are  up  against  human 
nature.  You  have  got  to  change  that  first.”  With  this  I 
now  so  far  agree  that  I  am  sure  there  will  be  no  change 
in  society  without  a  corresponding  change  in  human 
nature.  This,  looked  at  rightly,  is  obvious.  Our  social 
institutions  are  nothing  but  our  minds  materialized. 
A  Kafir  village  expresses  Kafir  ways  of  thinking  and 
feeling  ;  New  York  is  the  American  mind  turned  into 
stone,  brick,  and  re-inforced  concrete ;  and,  as  Dr. 
Temple,  Bishop  of  Manchester,  has  truly  said,  if  you 
take  800,000  men  and  women  neither  better  nor  worse 
than  the  average,  greedy  for  pleasure,  careless  of  duty, 
and  indifferent  to  the  claims  of  others,  any  one  of  our 
hideous  modern  cities,  with  its  gaols,  and  slums,  and 
publichouses  and  general  ugliness,  is  what  you  may 
naturally  expect.  Indeed  the  neglect  of  this  aspect  of 
the  subject  on  the  part  of  many  social  reformers  is 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


87 


astonishing.  I  once  travelled  with  a  very  keen  Guild 
Socialist  who,  for  two  hours,  expounded  his  views  to 
me.  I  asked  him  if  he  had  allowed  enough  for  the 
weaknesses  of  human  nature.  He  replied  “  I  never 
pay  any  attention  to  human  nature.”  “  Then,”  I 
replied  “  you  have  destroyed  my  interest  in  all  you 
have  said  during  the  last  two  hours.”  For  morality 
and  social  science  have  a  common  foundation,  namely 
that  we  are  members  one  of  another,  and  we  owe  the 
fact  that  either  is  possible  to  man’s  ability  to  restrain 
in  himself  the  ape  and  the  tiger,  and  to  realize  Jove. 
And  yet  there  are  men  who  pretend  that  the  new  social 
order  can  be  achieved  not  only  without  morality  but 
by  means  of  an  ostentatious  repudiation  of  moral 
systems,  and  that  the  motive  power  in  which  we  are  to 

“  build  Jerusalem 

In  this  our  green  and  pleasant  land  ” 
is  hatred. 

But,  it  will  be  asked,  can  Christianity  change  human 
nature  ?  Certainly  it  can.  What  else  is  it  for  ?  If 
it  can’t  do  that  it  can  do  nothing.  The  promise  of 
Christianity  is  that  ”  the  creation  itself  also  shall  be 
delivered  from  the  bondage  of  corruption  into  the 
liberty  of  the  glory  of  the  children  of  God.*”  And  this 
promise  is  literally  fulfilled,  as  far  as  individuals  are 
concerned,  daily  before  our  eyes.  Nothing  astonishes 
me  more  than  the  failure  of  many,  I  might  almost  say 
most,  people  to  recognise  the  power  of  a  vital  religion  to 
create  a  “  new  man.”  Let  me  pick  a  few  examples  out 
of  thousands  I  have  known.  Thirty  years  ago  a  working¬ 
man  said  to  me,  “  A  drunken  man  you  may  cure,  sir, 
but  a  drunken  woman  never.”  I  simply  replied,  “  And 


88 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


what  about  Mrs.  H.  ?  ”  “  Fve  got  my  answer/’  he 
replied.  I  had  named  one  who  had  been  the  terror  of 
the  district,  and  who,  when  I  spoke  and  for  twenty 
years  after,  to  the  day  of  her  death,  was  a  saint,  the  best 
mother,  the  kindest  friend,  the  brightest  merriest 
companion,  in  the  world. 

Just  before  the  war  I  was  walking  up  and  down  our 
rather  dingy  Mission  Room,  during  the  “  tea  interval  ” 
of  a  Tuesday  night  Temperance  Concert,  talking  to  the 
young  flying-corps  officer  whom  I  have  mentioned  more 
than  once  already.  Suddenly  he  said  to  me  “  Who  is 
that  woman,  over  there  in  the  corner,  with  the  beautiful 
face  ?  ”  Strictly  speaking  she  was  only  a  plain,  hard 
featured  Lancashire  woman  of  five  or  six  and  forty. 
But  the  light  of  a  very  beautiful  soul  shone  through. 
I  told  my  friend  her  story.  She  had  drunk  fearfully, 
making  her  home  a  perfect  hell  for  her  husband  and 
children.  Then  she  was  truly  converted.  And  some 
time  after  she  said  to  one  of  our  lady  visitors  “You  never 
come  to  see  me,  Miss,  without  looking  round  to  see  if 
there  is  any  drink  in  the  house.  Well,  I  am  sure  I  don’t 
blame  you.  For  I  often  wonder  how  God  made  a 
woman  out  of  the  dreadful  thing  I  was.  But  I  shall 
never  go  back  to  the  drink.  Sometimes  even  now  my 
body  cries  out  for  it  till  I  can’t  sleep.  But  its  not  me, 
its  my  body.  Its  something  outside  me,  like  a  dog 
barking  in  the  yard,  which  can  keep  me  away,  and  make 
me  miserable,  but  it  can’t  touch  me.  I  shall  never  go 
back  to  it.’’ 

But  people  often  deny  that  cases  of  reformed 
drunkards  are  real  evidence.  Drunkenness,  they  say, 
is  a  form  of  madness.  If  some  strong  emotion  supplies 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


89 


the  power  to  abstain  from  alcohol  for  a  short  time  the 
desire  for  it  vanishes,  the  patient  has  time  and  oppor¬ 
tunity  to  realize  the  misery,  danger,  and  degradation 
of  his  slavery,  and  a  cure  results  in  most  cases.  But 
there  are  plenty  of  “  new  men  ”  besides  reformed 
drunkards.  I  could  quote  cases  of  the  results  of 
conversion  in  which  sins  and  short  comings  of  all  sorts, 
lust,  and  cruelty,  and  bad  temper,  and  selfishness,  had 
been  cured,  the  old  man  done  away  and  the  new  man 
raised  up.  And  the  power  of  the  Spirit  is  not  shewn 
only  in  the  reform  of  those  who  have  fallen,  but  often 
equally  plainly,  and  even  more  attractively,  in  the  growth 
and  development  of  those  who  have  sought  God  early 
and  found  him.  I  could  quote  many  examples  since,  as 
I  said  in  Chapter  VI,  one  of  my  reasons  for  believing 
in  Christianity,  is  that  “  it  suits  boys  and  girls.”  But  it 
is  far  better  that  the  reader  should  collect  his  or  her 
own  examples.  If  anyone  doubts  the  power  of  Christ, 
and  wonders  whether  we  should  not  do  better  to  look 
to  education,  or  social  reform,  or  a  changed  political 
system,  for  improvement,  and,  in  short  says  to  Christ, 
“  Art  Thou  he  That  should  come,  or  look  we  for  another  ?  ” 
the  answer  to-day  is  the  same  as  it  was  nineteen  centuries 
ago,  namely  the  witness  of  the  things  which  we  have 
heard  and  seen,  ‘‘How  that  the  blind  see,  the  lame  walk, 
the  lepers  are  cleansed,  the  deaf  hear,  the  dead  are 
raised  up,  to  the  poor  the  gospel  is  preached.”  1  Some 
people  will  object  that  Christ  here  was  speaking  of 
physical  marvels  and  I  am  applying  the  text  merely 
to  moral  cures.  I  do  not  admit  it.  I  am  willing  to 
grant  that,  owing  to  the  weak  state  of  religion  generally, 

1  S.  Luke  vii.  20  and  22. 


go 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


and  the  feebleness  of  our  faith,  and  the  Church’s  forget¬ 
fulness  of  her  mission  to  heal  the  body  as  well  as  the 
soul,  physical  miracles  are  rare,  but  they  are  not  unknown. 
I  will  take  but  one  example  from  my  own  experience. 
Some  time  ago  a  very  old  working  woman  died  in  a  back 
street  in  Salford.  Some  time  before  she  died  she  told 
me  how,  when  she  was  about  35,  after  having  drunk 
very  heavily  for  years,  she  took  epileptic  fits.  These 
grew  on  her  till  she  often  had  four  or  five  a  day  and 
could  never  be  trusted  in  the  street  alone.  After  six 
and  twenty  years  of  this  affliction,  during  which  “  she 
had  suffered  many  things  of  many  physicians,  and  had 
spent  all  that  she  bad,  and  was  nothing  bettered,  but 
rather  grew  wrorse,” 1  she  was  converted,  under  the 
ministry  of  the  late  Canon  Hicks,  afterwards  Bishop  of 
Lincoln,  and  Captain  Rowlands  of  the  Church  Army. 
“That  might  in  Barrow  Street  Mission  Room  ”  she  said 
“  I  prayed  ‘  0  Lord,  as  Thou  hast  taken  away  the  sin  of 
my  soul,  take  away  the  weakness  of  my  body.”  After 
the  meeting  she  walked  home  by  herself,  and  never 
had  the  least  symptom  of  a  fit  again.  Truly  “  the  voice 
of  joy  and  health  is  in  the  dwellings  of  the  righteous,”  2 
and  if  we  have  fewer  miracles  of  healing  than  we  desire, 
I  think  we  have  as  many  as  we  deserve. 

But  if  Christ  can  make  of  one  poor  sinner,  broken 
and  ruined  in  soul  and  body,  a  “New  Man  ”  He  can 
work  the  same  miracle  for  ten,  or  ten  million,  or  fifteen 
hundred  million.  What  hinders  Him  is  men’s  lack  of 
faith.  “  He  can  do  no  mighty  works  because  of  their 
unbelief.” 

Now  we  may  frankly  admit  that,  if  all  the  whole 
1  S.  Mark  v.  26.  2  Ps.  cxviii  15  P.  B.  version. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


9* 


world  were  deeply  and  truly  converted  to-day  the  task 
— supposing  the  world  did  not  at  once  come  to  an  end, 
which  I  am  inclined  to  believe  it  would  do — would 
have  to  be  done  all  over  again  with  the  next  generation. 
For  a  man  is  not  a  Christian  because  his  parents  were, 
but  each  individual  soul  has  to  make  the  individual 
decision  for  Christ.  But  though  each  generation  has 
to  fight  the  battle  anew  that  battle  has  not,  in  each 
generation,  to  be  refought  on  the  same  plane.  There  is 
such  a  thing  as  progress  and  each  generation  may,  and 
should,  fight  on  a  higher  plane  and  dispute  loftier  issues 
than  the  last.  We  have  abolished  slavery,  and  duelling, 
and  the  worst  forms  of  religious  persecution,  and 
improved  the  status  of  women,  and  gained  a  faith  in  the 
essential  brotherhood  of  all  men,  and  aroused  a  public 
conscience  on  the  question  of  undeserved  suffering, 
and  founded  hospitals  and  orphanages,  and  lunatic 
asylums  which  are  asylums  and  not  hells  of  torture. 
It  seems  to  me  that  anyone  who  denies  the  Gesta  Christi, 
the  works  of  Christ  and  His  Church,  in  the  world  must 
be  utterly  ignorant  of  history.  Let  such  a  man  try 
to  do  some  first  hand  study — study  that  is  to  say  of 
contemporary  writings — of  the  later  Roman  Empire, 
of  Germany  during  the  Thirty  Years  War,  of  France 
under  Louis  XV.,  of  the  England  of  the  Georges,  and 
ask  “  Is  there  no  progress  here  ?  ”  It  is  the  fashion 
with  opponents  of  Christianity  to  put  down  all  the  evil 
in  history  to  the  church  and  all  the  good  to  “  civilization.’ ’ 
But  what  is  Christian  civilization  but  the  working  of 
“  that  one  and  the  self-same  Spirit,  dividing  to  every 
man  (and  nation)  severally  as  He  will  ?  ” 1  And  if 


1  1  Cor.  xii.  11. 


92 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


anyone  claims  that  that  Spirit  is  the  spirit  of  man,  not 
of  Christ,  I  will  ask  him  to  study  life  in  non-Christian 
countries.  I  will  offer  three  pieces  of  testimony. 

Some  few  months  before  he  died  the  late  Sir  Mark 
Sykes,  the  great  authority  on  Mahommedan  countries, 
who  had  a  real  love  and  admiration  for  the  Turks, 
said  to  me  "  No  one  who  has  lived  all  his  life  in  Christian 
countries  knows  all  he  owes  to  Christianity.  He  does 
not  know  the  awful  morass  of  cruelty,  degradation, 
and  filth  on  which  non-Christian  civilization  rests." 

And  this  agrees  perfectly  with  what  a  missionary 
bishop  from  Central  Africa  once  said  to  me.  He  declared 
that  it  was  quite  impossible  for  anyone,  who  had  not 
experienced  it,  to  realize  what  the  atmosphere  of  a  pre¬ 
dominantly  heathen  country  was  like,  or  the  difference 
made  by  even  a  small  leaven  of  practising  Christians. 
"The  setting  up  of  the  first  Christian  altar,"  he  declared, 
"  is  like  lighting  a  candle  in  a  dark  room.  It  may  not 
be  powerful  enough  to  scatter  all  the  shadows.  But  it 
makes  all  the  difference  between  light  and  darkness ." 

And  less  this  testimony,  being  that  of  a  missionary, 
should  be  regarded  as  biased,  I  will  quote  the  witness 
of  a  South  African  Director  of  Native  Labour,  a  man 
who  had  had  wide  experience  of  native  labourers  in 
Asia,  Africa,  and  America.  It  was  quite  curious  to 
contrast  his  sincere  and  whole-hearted  admiration  both 
for  Chinamen  and  for  Kafirs  as  men,  and  his  sense  of 
the  splendid  material  which  they  offered  for  evangelisa¬ 
tion,  with  his  absolute  horror  of  their  moral  condition. 
Indeed,  though  a  very  loyal  and  practising  churchman, 
ready  to  go  to  any  trouble  to  help  his  church,  he  was 
very  bitter  about  the  failure  of  the  church  at  home  to 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


93 

support  missions  adequately  and  to  try  and  bring  the 
heathen  world  out  of  darkness  to  light. 

May  we  not  ask  what  a  man  can  know  of  Christ  in 
his  own  life  if  he  doubts  His  power  to  change  human 
nature  and  to  save  the  whole  world  ?  If  anyone  knows 
Christ’s  power  in  his  own  life,  will  he  not  say  “  I  am 
not  ashamed  of  the  gospel  of  Christ ;  for  it  is  the  power 
of  God  unto  salvation  to  every  one  that  believeth,  to 
the  Jew  first,  and  also  to  the  Greek  ?  "l 


1  Rom.  i.  16. 


94 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  CHRISTIAN  IN  THE  WORLD  TO-DAY 

We  are  now  to  consider  how  this  mighty  regenerative 
force  of  personal  religion  may  best  be  brought  to  bear 
on  the  problems  which  await  solution.  And  in  this 
enquiry  we  cannot  be  too  plain,  too  homely,  or  too 
definite.  What  is  wanted  is  not  vague  generalizations 
but  simple  rules  which  can  be  put  into  practice  by  plain 
men  and  women  between  Sunday  morning  and  Saturday 
night. 

Well  first  of  all  we  must  be  content  to  follow  the 
directions  of  conscience  without  expecting  to  see 
immediate  results.  There  are  somewhere  about  1500 
million  people  in  the  world.  Each  one  is  a  potential 
member  of  the  Bodj'  of  Christ,1  through  whom  the  Holy 
Spirit  might  work.  When  all  possible  allowances 
have  been  made  for  the  heathen,  and  for  unconverted 
and  imperfectly  converted  Christians,  there  must  still 
be  very  many  millions  of  true  and  sincere  fellow- 
labourers  with  God.  Hence  the  part  of  the  work  done  by 
each  must  be  small,  though  not  for  that  reason  unimpor¬ 
tant.  If  we  hold  back  till  we  can  see  the  object,  impor¬ 
tance  and  immediate  result  of  each  piece  of  work  for 

1  1  Cor.  xii.  27. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


95 


God,  we  shall  be  like  soldiers  in  the  late  war  declining 
to  do  any  work  which  could  not  be  shewn  to  lead  to  an 
immediate  and  final  victory.  Often  soldiers  have  no 
idea  at  all  why  they  are  called  on  to  do  this  or  that. 
It  is  enough  for  them  that  it  is  the  General’s  orders,  and 
that  it  forms  part  of  his  plan  of  campaign.  If  we  strive 
earnestly  to  obey  the  teachings  of  the  Church,  and  the 
dictates  of  our  consciences,  we  cannot  go  wrong,  for  our 
Captain  of  Salvation 1  is  not  one  who  blunders.  And  a 
very  little  thought  will  convince  us  that  it  is  a  good  thing 
that  we  have  thus  to  “  walk  by  faith,  not  by  sight.”  2 
If  we  saw  the  immediate  result  of  all  our  efforts  for  God, 
we  might  be — indeed  we  could  hardly  help  being — 
influenced  by  desire  for  those  results  rather  than  by  love 
for  God.  And  if  the  results  were  as  easily  seen  by  others 
as  by  ourselves,  how  difficult  it  would  be  to  exclude  pride, 
self-seeking  and  the  desire  for  the  praise  of  men.  Now 
and  then  of  course  God  allows  one  of  His  workers  to 
“  see  the  travail  of  his  soul,  and  be  satisfied.” 3  I 
expect  many  Sunday  School  teachers  and  social  workers 
during  the  war  got  letters  something  like  the  following, 
which  was  written  to  an  old  Bible  Class  leader  by  a 
young  soldier,  the  night  before  he  was  killed  in  action  : 

”  Dear  Friend,  I  take  my  pen  in  hand  to  write 
you  th(  se  few  lines,  for  somehow  I  think  I  may  never 
have  another  chance.  It  was  a  good  day,  not  only 
for  me  but  for  all  our  family,  when  you  first 
knocked  at  our  door.  Perhaps  you  have  thought 
me  ungrateful,  for  I  have  never  been  able  to  thank 


1  Heb.  ii.  io. 

2  2  Cor.  v.  7. 

3  Isaiah  liii.  1  j. 


g6 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


you  the  way  I  ought,  for  all  you  have  done  for  us. 
But  some  day,  when  you  are  as  near  death  as  I  think 
I  am  to-night,  it  may  comfort  you  to  know  that  if 
there  is  any  good  in  me  I  owe  it  all  to  you.  May 
God  bless  you,  dear  friend,  if  we  never  meet  again.” 

But  such  rewards,  such  proofs  of  success,  are  and 
must  be  the  exception,  not  the  rule.  We  must  be 
content  to  do  our  work  for  the  love  of  God  alone. 

But  one  thing  we  can  all  do,  and  that  is — if  I  may 
quote  again  the  text  with  which  the  last  chapter  ended 
— to  shew  boldly  to  the  whole  world  that  we  are  "  not 
ashamed  of  the  gospel  of  Christ,”  and  that  we  do  indeed 
believe  that  it  is  ”  the  power  of  God  unto  salvation  unto 
everyone  that  belie veth.”  If  we  believed  half  that  we 
read  in  the  newspapers,  and  half  that  we  hear,  often  from 
churchmen  and  churchwomen  who  ought  to  know  better, 
we  should  believe  that  science  had  utterly  disproved, 
and  philosophers  unanimously  rejected,  Christianity, 
that  historical  and  textual  criticism  had  left  no  chapter  of 
Holy  Scripture  not  discredited,  that  the  moral  influence 
of  the  Church  was  negligible  and  her  social  services 
non-existent,  that  the  churches  were  empty  and  the 
clergy  lazy  and  despised,  depressed  themselves  and 
depressing  to  others.  M.  Coue  assures  us  that  if  we  say, 
with  conviction,  ‘  Every  day  and  in  every  way  I  am 
getting  better  and  better  ”  we  do  get  better  and  better. 
Then  what  is  the  effect  on  ourselves — to  say  nothing 
of  the  effect  on  eager  and  enthusiastic  young  people, 
and  on  a  careless  and  indifferent,  and  even  hostile, 
world — of  saying  over  and  over  again  “  Every  day  and  in 
every  way  the  Church  grows  more  and  more  futile,  and 
religion  is  proved  to  be  more  and  more  worthless  ?  ” 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


97 


Do  we  not  all  know  how  it  cheers  and  braces  us  to  meet 
someone  with  an  obvious  faith  and  delight  in  his  or  her 
religion  ?  Some  time  ago  I  was  in  mixed  company 
where  there  was  an  obvious  tendency  to  sneer  at 
religion.  Quietly  and  unostentaciously,  but  quite 
firmly  and  clearly,  a  leading  business  man  of  about  45, 
the  head  of  a  vast  business,  and  interested  in  half  a 
score  of  other  concerns  as  well,  let  it  be  known  that  he 
was  a  churchman,  that  he  loved  and  tried  to  practice 
his  religion,  and  that  he  counted  nothing  a  trouble  where 
he  could  help  and  support  his  Vicar.  Instantly  the 
whole  trend  of  the  conversation,  the  whole  atmospheie 
of  the  room,  changed.  Or  take  another  example.  Early 
in  the  war  thirty- two  young  recruits  met  for  the  first 
time  in  a  hut.  After  a  visit  by  the  Chaplain  one  recruit, 
as  if  flying  a  kite  to  test  the  feeling  of  the  rest,  said 
something  against  religion.  At  once  a  lad  of  20  spoke 
up  “  I  don't  agree  with  you  at  all,”  he  said,  “  I  don’t 
care  where  a  fellow  goes,  but  he  ought  to  attend  some 
place  of  worship.  Life  would  be  a  poor  thing  without 
God.  I  know  before  I  joined  up  if  I  had  a  Sunday  with¬ 
out  going  to  church  things  seemed  to  go  wrong  all  the 
week.”  Thirty  out  of  the  thirty-two  agreed  with  him. 
Why  should  we,  any  of  us,  weaken  the  cause  of  Christ, 
and  cause  the  weak  brother  to  stumble,  because  we  are 
too  cowardly  to  “  say  a  good  word  for  the  Lord  Jesus  ?  ” 
Why  should  it  not  be  our  part  to  “  come  to  the  help  of 
the  Lord  against  the  mighty  ?  ” 1 
“  But,”  the  objector  will  say,  “  how  if  the  charges 
brought  against  religion  are  true  ?  ”  But  they  are  not, 
and  it  is  perfectly  easy  to  prove  that  they  are  not. 

1  Judges  v.  23. 

H 


98 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


Take  first  the  statement  that  Natural  Science  has 
proved  Christianity  untrue.  Nothing  could  be  more 
absurd.  The  heyday  of  the  so  called  opposition  of 
science  to  religion  was  the  last  thirty  years  of  last 
century  from  the  publication  of  the  Descent  of  Man 
(1871),  and  the  high  priests  of  that  opposition  were 
Huxley  and  Tyndall.  With  the  individual  facts  which 
science  discovered,  and  relied  on,  the  church  had  nothing 
to  do.  It  was  no  business  of  hers  either  to  affirm  or 
deny  them.  The  fact  that  leadng  churchmen  were 
slow  to  accept  Darwin’s  theory  no  more  made  the 
"  church  ”  an  opponent  of  natural  science  than  Disraeli’s 
declaration,  "  For  my  part  I  am  on  the  side  of  the 
angels,”  made  "  politics  ”  an  opponent  of  natural  science. 
But  of  the  philosophy  which  many  men  of  science  based 
on  those  facts,  the  materialistic  conception  of  the 
universe,  the  idea  of  an  universe  from  which,  as  Huxley 
said,  "Science  seeks  to  banish  every  idea  of  spirit  and 
spontaneity,”  the  church  had  rightly  a  great  deal  to 
say.  At  no  time  in  history  were  the  claims  of  science  as 
against  religion  more  arrogantly  urged,  or  apparently 
more  firmly  based.  Yet  the  view  of  the  universe 
championed  by  Huxley  and  his  school  is  now  deader 
than  Pharoah,  utterly  rejected  and  discredited  among 
educated  men.  And  it  is  rejected  for  precisely  those 
reasons  for  which  Christians  rejected  it  when  at  its 
greatest  height  of  reputation  and  influence.  In  a 
word  (and  it  cannot  be  stated  too  plainly  or  repeated 
too  often)  the  men  of  science  were  wrong  and  the  church 
was  right.  There  is  to-day  not  a  word  in  natural  science 
which  need  hinder  a  man  from  being  a  practising 
Catholic. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


99 


Precisely  the  same  is  true  of  philosophy  and  psycho¬ 
logy.  At  a  recent  meeting  of  philosophers  I  heard 
one  of  the  chief  men,  though  not  I  believe  himself  a 
Christian,  say  “  I  would  by  no  means  deny  that  in 
the  near  future  philosophy  will  become  more  and  more 
definitely  theistic,  and  even  perhaps  Christian.”  No 
other  philosophy,  no  other  view  that  is  to  say  of  life  as 
a  whole,  can  find  room  for  all  the  facts  of  experience, 
as  Christinaity  can.  If  anyone  disputes  this  statement 
let  him  ask  any  Materialist,  Absolute  Idealist,  Prag¬ 
matist,  or  non-Christian  Realist  what  explanation 
he  has  of  evil,  and  especially  of  moral  evil  or  sin. 

Criticism  has  certainly  modified  our  views  of  the 
Old  Testament.  But  two  things  may  safely  be  asserted. 
Firstly  the  religious  and  spiritual  value  of  the  Old 
Testament  to-day  is  increased  not  decreased  by  the  new 
knowledge,  and  secondly  our  views  to-day  are  far  more 
like  those  of  the  early  church  than  the  views  of  our 
grandfathers  and  grandmothers  were.  For  my  own 
part  I  think  the  criticism  of  the  Old  Testament  has 
brought  us  nothing  but  gain.  And  this  is  even  more 
true  of  the  New  Testament.  The  most  violent  and 
revolutionary  utterances  of  extreme  critics,  from  the 
absurdities  of  Van  Manen  on  the  epistles  of  S.  Paul 
to  M.  Loisy’s  savage  attack  on  the  Acts,  are  quoted 
in  the  press  as  if  they  were  the  accepted  results  of  an 
exact  science,  instead  of  the  eccentricities  of  individuals 
which  no  serious  scholar  accepts.  What  we  are  not 
told,  but  what  is  none  the  less  true,  is  that  fifty  years  of 
such  searching  and  unceasing  criticism  as  no  other 
books  have  ever  been  subjected  to,  has  simply  resulted 
in  establishing,  beyond  question,  the  authenticity  and 


100 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


historic  value  of  most  (one  might  almost  say  of  all  but 
one  or  two  of  the  least  important)  of  the  books  of  the 
New  Testament  and  putting  back  the  late  dates,  assigned 
to  them  in  the  period  1860-1890,  to  what  tradition  has 
always  claimed  for  them. 

As  for  the  social  work  of  the  Church — and  here  I 
speak  of  all  denominations,  and  of  all  who  love  our 
Lord — let  the  reader  ask  any  Mayor,  any  Chief  Constable, 
any  School  Attendance  Officer,  or  any  Health  Visitor, 
what  would  be  the  condition  of  our  great  cities,  or  indeed 
of  our  country  dictricts,  if  the  churches  ceased  their 
religious,  moral,  and  social  work  for  a  year.  But  no 
reader  need  put  such  a  question.  It  has  been  already 
put  and  answered.  During  the  crisis  of  the  war  the 
Home  Office  established  a  special  Committee  to  promote 
and  encourage,  for  all  young  people  of  both  sexes 
employed  in  industry,  social  work  of  precisely  the  kind 
which  the  church  has  been  doing  for  half  a  century, 
in  clubs  and  camps  and  brigades.  Truly,  as  Dr. 
Creighton  said,  when  the  Church  has  carried  on  any 
good  work  long  enough  to  convince  a  careless  world 
of  its  value,  the  State  steps  in,  takes  it  over,  and  calls 
the  process  reform. 

What  I  want  is  Christians  who,  having  first  convinced 
themselves,  will  then  boldly  declare  to  the  world 
“  Christianity,  and  Christianity  alone,  is  and  has  what 
man  needs/'  Often  when  I  look  round  a  great  congre¬ 
gation  I  say  to  myself  "  What  could  not  Christ  do  for 
and  in  this  city  if  every  man,  woman  and  child  here 
present  really  stood  boldly  for  Him  in  the  home,  the 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


IOI 


workshop  and  the  playing  field  ?  ”  There  are  such 
Christians.  Why  not  more  ? 

And  as  we  can — and,  if  we  wish  to  fulfil  our  baptismal 
vow,  as  we  all  must — be  “  Christ's  faithful  soldiers  .  .  . 
unto  our  lives'  end  "  ;  boldly  standing  up  for  our  faith, 
and  refusing  to  sit  silent  while  it  is  misrepresented, 
attacked,  and  belittled,  so  too  we  can  and  must  be 
“  Christ's  faithful  .  .  .  servants  ”  working  for  the 
extension  of  His  Kingdom.  There  is  an  immense 
amount  of  social  and  religious  work  waiting  to  be  done, 
and  workers  are  sadly  lacking.  People  often  say  “  Oh  ! 
we  can’t  all  be  Sunday  School  teachers  and  district 
visitors.”  Certainly  not.  But  a  great  many  might 
be,  who  are  not,  and  others  might  find  other  work  they 
could  do.  For  what  purpose  has  any  man  or  women 
been  granted  powers  of  body,  mind,  or  soul  except  to 
use  them  unstintingly  in  the  service  of  others  ?  I  do 
not  pretend  that  work  for  others  is  always  pleasant  or 
easy.  What  is  worth  giving  must  cost  us  something, 
and  work  worth  doing  must  be  done  at  the  cost  of  some 
weariness,  and  discouragement,  and  self-denial.  But  if 
not  always  pleasant  and  easy  at  the  time,  especially 
at  first,  it  is  always  richly  rewarded.  It  is  strange  that 
so  small  a  proportion  of  our  young  men  of  the  upper  and 
middle  classes  hear  the  call  to  work,  as  Scout  Masters, 
Brigade  officers,  or  Club  workers,  or  in  other  ways,  for 
the  welfare  of  boys  and  young  men  less  favourably 
situated.  Many  an  ex-public  school  man  can  recall 
the  effect  upon  him,  in  his  younger  days,  of  the  friend¬ 
ship  and  inspiration  of  some  master  at  school.  Why 
do  not  such  men  try  to  do  something  in  their  turn  for 
the  rising  generation  of  the  workers.  “  Freely  ye  have 


102 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


received,  freely  give.”1  They  would  if  they  realized 
the  need  for  the  work,  and  the  ill  that  comes,  alike  to 
individuals  and  to  society,  from  the  lack  of  it.  And  even 
if  a  young  man — or  a  young  woman,  since  what  is  true 
of  one  is  true  of  the  other — does  not  feel  able  to  do 
directly  religious  work,  or  work  with  individuals,  there 
is  boundless  need  for  social  and  educational  work. 
Surely  no  life  ought  to  be  entirely  taken  up  with 
earning  one’s  living  and  enjoying  one’s  leisure.  To 
“  Getting”  and  "  Spending  ”  should  be  added  “  Giving,” 
and  that  not  of  money  only  but  of  self.  Many  ladies 
in  the  middle  classes  would  be  far  happier  if  they  spared 
an  afternoon  a  week  from  social  pleasures>  and  so-called 
social  duties,  and  devoted  it  to  friendly  visits  among 
their  poorer  neighbours.  I  know  a  lady  who,  having  to 
earn  her  own  living,  has  no  money  to  give  and  little 
time.  Yet  since  I  began  writing  this  chapter  I  have 
been  to  one  of  the  half  dozen  homes  she  visits  and  the 
woman,  an  over-worked  delicate  mother  of  many 
children,  said  “  I  am  sure  I  can’t  say  what  Miss  X.’s 
visit  have  been  to  me  these  last  six  years.  Having 
her  as  a  friend  has  been  wonderful.  I’ll  never  be  able 
to  thank  her  enough,  or  God  for  sending  her.”  So  here 
are  three  rules  for  applied  religion  — 

(i)  Follow  your  conscience,  and  the  guidance  of  the 
Holy  Ghost,  and  leave  the  results  to  God. 

(ii)  Don’t  be  ashamed  of  the  Gospel  of  Christ  but  let 
people  know  that  you  do  believe  it  to  be  the  power  of 
God  unto  salvation. 

(iii)  Do  some  definite  piece  of  religious  or  social  work 
for  others. 


1  S.  Matt.  x.  viii. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


103 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  CHRISTIAN  AND  THE  COMING  KINGDOM 

I  am  sure  that  an  immense,  indeed  an  immeasurable 
advance  in  the  effective  power  of  religion,  and  therefore 
in  human  happiness,  would  immediately  result  from  the 
adoption,  by  all  Christians,  of  the  three  plain  rules  laid 
down  at  the  end  of  the  last  chapter.  But  some  of  my 
readers,  especially  among  young  people,  will  be  inclined 
to  say  “  All  this  is  very  old  fashioned,  and  amounts  to 
no  more  than  advice  to  make  the  best  of  things  as  they 
are.  We  want  to  alter  things  radically.  Have  you 
no  advise  to  give  us,  beyond  this  world-old  advice  to  try 
to  rub  along  as  best  we  can  in  a  cruel  and  unjust  world  ?” 
I  would  reply  that  I  have  some  very  definite  advice  to 
give.  I  welcome  this  spirit  of  what  I  may  call  “  Christian 
revolution  ”  and  I  long  to  see  it  re-mould  the  world. 
Let  us  see  what  we  must  aim  at  for  the  future. 

We  want  a  New  World,  and  the  realization  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God  ?  Very  good  !  Then  we  must  look  for 
these  things  as  dependent  on  a  change  of  mental  outlook 
on  the  part  of  men.  The  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is  within 
us,  and  a  New  World  implies  new  men.  What  are  the 
ruling  passions  of  fallen  man  ?  We  may  unhesitatingly 
accept  the  Buddhist  psychology  and  reply  that  they  are 


104 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


Greed,  Anger  and  Lust.  What  we  need  is  a  true  change 
of  mind  (jieravola ,  or  repentance)  in  these  three  things. 
Let  us  consider  them  separately. 

Greed.  The  lust  to  possess  for  possession's  sake  is 
one  of  the  fundamental  characteristics  of  fallen  man. 
The  author  of  that  exquisite  mystical  treatise  the 
Theologia  Germanica  declares  that  man  fell,  not  when 
he  eat  an  apple  but  when  he  first  said  "  Me,  My,  Mine," 
when  that  is  to  say  he  desired  something  for  his  own 
exclusive  possession.  We  are  often  told  that  no  one 
will  be  discontented,  envious,  or  unhappy  under  socialism 
since  all  will  have  enough.  Those  who  talk  like  this 
know  nothing  of  human  nature.  When  men’s  hearts 
are  set  on  material  goods  no  one  ever  has  enough,  for 
the  definition  of  “  enough  ”  is  "  a  little  more  than  you 
have  got.”  The  wealth  per  head  in  England  to-day 
is  vastly  greater  than  it  was  in  the  reign  of  George  I ; 
and  in  the  reign  of  George  I  was  vastly  greater  than 
in  the  reign  of  William  I.  Yet  it  is  very  doubtful 
if  the  general  level  of  happiness  is  higher  to-day  than 
in  either  of  the  previous  eras.  The  poorest  labourer 
to-day  has  within  his  reach  comforts  and  refinements 
which  were  unknown  to  Lord  Bacon.  Yet  Lord  Bacon, 
in  the  sixtenth  century  lived  a  full,  rich,  happy,  vivid 
life  that  any  man  in  the  twentieth  century  might  envy. 
It  is  quite  possible  that  by  2023  the  wealth  of  the  world 
will  have  increased  a  hundredfold.  Yet  if  man  still 
insists  that  his  life  does  consist  in  the  abundance  of  the 
things  which  he  possesses  the  only  result  will  be  that  the 
rich,  the  possessors,  will  be  increasingly  bored  and 
distracted,  and  the  poor,  the  dispossessed,  increasingly 
bitter,  envious  and  miserable. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


105 


Is  there  any  cure  ?  Will  not  most  men,  in  all  ages, 
strive  to  get  rich  ?  Certainly  there  is  a  cure.  And  though 
men  will,  and  indeed  should,  strive  to  get  rich,  may  we 
not  hope  that  religion  will  teach  them,  even  in  the  very 
near  future,  what  are  man's  true  riches  ?  The  lesson 
ought  not  to  be  hard  to  learn.  Someone  gives  you, 
as  a  present,  something  not  necessary  for  your  real 
comfort  or  efficiency.  To-day  it  is  a  pleasure  ;  a  fort¬ 
night  hence  it  is  forgotten  except  when  immediately 
before  your  eyes  ;  at  the  end  of  the  year  it  is  one  more 
possession  to  collect  dust  and  to  be  kept  clean.  On  the 
other  hand  anyone  who  has  ever  tried  seriously  to 
emancipate  himself  from  the  tyranny  of  possessions, 
to  live  simply,  to  eat  and  drink  no  more  than  is  necessary 
for  health,  avoiding  expensive  luxuries  and  rich  foods, 
and  to  live  “  released  from  the  wheel  of  things,"  knows 
how  life  grows  in  depth,  richness  and  joy  with  each 
renunciation.  Surely  it  should  be  possible  to  teach 
people  that  expensive  food  and  rich  wine,  costly  and 
luxurious  clothes,  large  houses  full  of  furniture,  and  lives 
spent  running  after  amusement,  never  yet  yielded 
any  real  happiness,  while  the  real  sources  of  pleasure 
are  love,  friendship,  service,  goodness,  truth,  beauty, 
nature,  and  the  simple  life.  When  men  and  women 
learn  “  having  food  and  raiment  to  be  therewith  content  ”1 
there  will  be  enough  for  all  since  the  things  which  all 
will  desire  will  be  such  as  increase  by  being  shared. 
Once,  at  a  religious  conference,  I  spoke  on  “  evangelical 
poverty.”  After  the  meeting  we  had  some  music  and 
then  adjourned  to  dinner.  My  neighbour  at  table  said 
to  me  chaffingly,  "  What  is  the  moral  difference  between 


1 1  Tim.  vi.  9. 


io6  PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 

my  enjoyment  of  a  peach,  and  your  enjoyment  of  a 
Beethoven  sonata  ?  I  expect,  if  you  take  everything 
into  account,  the  sonata  costs  most  to  produce.”  I 
replied  “  The  difference  is  obvious.  If  you  eat  the  peach, 
I  can't.  But  if  I  listen  to  the  sonata,  you  and  a  hundred 
others  can  listen  too,  not  only  with  no  diminution  of 
my  pleasure,  but  even  with  an  increase  of  it  through 
sympathetic  understanding.”  Let  the  reader  think 
how  many  of  our  "‘goods  ”  are  valued  only,  or  chiefly, 
because  they  are  exclusive.  Would  diamonds,  for  all 
their  beauty,  be  as  much  delighted  in  if  they  were  so 
cheap  that  all  could  enjoy  them  ? 

Is  there  not  a  certain  vulgarity  in  the  display  of 
riches  ?  If  a  party  of  ship-wrecked  people  are  on  a  raft 
the  man  who  takes  more  than  his  share  of  food  or  water 
is  despised  by  everyone.  But  what  of  the  Christian 
who  spends  needlessly  on  food,  clothes,  furniture,  orna¬ 
ments,  amusements  and  similar  things,  while  men,  women 
and  children — for  whom  Christ  died1 — lack  the  bare 
necessaries  of  life  ?  There  is  no  doubt  that  the  sight  of 
needless  profusion  and  luxury  on  the  part  of  professing 
Christians,  while  many  all  round  them  lack  what  is 
necessary  for  a  decent  standard  of  living,  is  a  real  cause 
of  unbelief  among  the  workers.  I  quite  recognise  that 
we  cannot  all  live  alike.  The  wife  of  a  wealthy  banker 
or  merchant  has  social  duties  to  perform,  and  her 
husband's  position  to  keep  up.  But  this  I  do  say,  that 
no  person  can  be  in  earnest  in  his  or  her  desire  for  the 
realization  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  upon  earth  who 
is  not  prepared  to  endure  some  “  hardness  as  a  good 


1  Romans  xiv.  15  and  1  Cor.  viii.  11. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS  107 

soldier  of  Jesus  Christ,” 1  but  insists  on  enjoying  all  the 
comforts,  luxuries  and  enjoyments  their  means  allow 
them  to  have.  I  fear  most  people  think  that  the  luxury 
of  the  idle  rich  begins  in  the  class  immediately  above  their 
own.  If  you  want  to  hasten  the  coming  of  the  Kingdom 
of  God,  try  very  earnestly  and  definitely  for  a  simpler, 
less  elaborate,  less  expensive  style  of  living,  first  as  a 
protest  against  any  having  too  much  while  some  go 
short,  and  secondly  as  a  witness  that  the  real  "  goods  ” 
of  life  are  not  material.  I  say  again  that  anyone  who 
will  try  it  will  prove  for  himself  that  a  certain  strictness 
and  asceticism  in  matters  of  food,  drink,  and  personal 
expenditure  so  far  from  decreasing  the  pleasures  of  life 
infinitely  increases  them. 

And  how  are  we  to  combat  the  second  of  the  evil  trio, 
namely  Anger  ?  It  takes,  of  course,  different  forms  in 
different  persons.  In  one  it  is  sudden  and  violent 
passion,  the  “  short  madness  ”  of  the  ancients  In 
another  it  is  cold,  inflexible  ill  will,  a  habit,  as  we  say  in 
the  North,  of  “  chewing  a  grievance.”  But  whatever 
form  it  takes  it  is  deadly  to  the  soul  for  it  is  always 
rooted  and  grounded  in  hatred,  and  “  God  is  Love,” 
and  hatred  and  love  cannot  abide  in  one  and  the  same 
heart.  How  are  we  to  combat  anger  and  hatred  ? 

In  this,  more  perhaps  than  in  any  department  of  life, 
it  is  necessary  to  learn  to  walk  before  we  run.  If  after 
the  war  the  Allies  had  said,“  The  ordinary  common  people 
in  the  countries  we  have  been  fighting  were  no  more 
responsible  for  the  war  than  ordinary  private  Enlishmen, 
Frenchmen,  or  Russians.  We  will  therefore  repudiate 
all  ideas  of  punishment  or  vengeance.  All  the  burdens 

1  2  Tim.  ii.  3. 


io8 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


of  the  war  shall  be  distributed  on  victors  and  vanquished 
alike ;  all  efforts  for  reconstruction  shall  be  made 
in  common ;  all  benefits  shall  be  shared  equally,"  what 
would  have  been  the  result  ?  Without  going  into  details 
which  would  fill  many  volumes  the  size  of  this,  we  may 
say  that  the  result  would  have  been  a  gigantic  step 
towards  the  coming  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  and  the 
immediate  realization  of  a  world  fit  for  heroes  to  live 
in.  Whereas  we  are  now  living  in  a  world  in  every  way 
worse  than  the  pre-war  world,  and  are  in  awful  danger 
of  another  world  war  which  if  it  comes,  must  inevitable 
destroy  western  civilization  as  completely  as  Roman 
civilization  was  destroyed  by  the  irruption  of  northern 
barbarians.  Why  was  not  this  statesmanlike  and 
Christian  policy  pursued  ?  Because  there  was  not,  in 
any  country,  the  attitude  of  mind  which  would  have 
rendered  it  possible.  No  politicians  can  be  much,  if 
at  all,  better  than  the  people  they  rule.  Every  country, 
it  is  said,  has  the  rulers  it  deserves.  Again  and  again, 
during  the  months  after  the  war,  excellent  Christians 
used  to  say  to  me,  “  But  you  surely  don't  mean  to  say 
that,  after  all  the  wickedness  they  have  committed,  the 
Germans  ought  to  be  in  as  good  a  position  as  if  they,  and 
not  we,  had  won  the  war  !  Do  you  mean  that  they  ought 
to  go  altogether  unpunished  ?  ”  I  always  felt  inclined 
to  reply,  “  How  many  times  this  week  have  you  said,  in 
public  and  private  prayer,  ‘  Forgive  us  our  trespasses, 
as  we  forgive  them  that  trespass  against  us  '  ?  "  It  is 
quite  vain  to  expect  the  coming  of  Christ's  Kingdom  in 
national  and  international  affairs  while  most  Christians 
not  only  make  no  effort  to  apply  His  teaching  in  daily 
life,  but  have  not  realized  that  there  is  any  obligation  to 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


109 


try  and  do  so.  As  well  might  we  expect  that  a  child 
who  could  not  yet  speak  plainly  to  his  nurse  in  the 
nursey  when  asking  for  his  bread-and-milk  would 
nevertheless  deliver  an  eloquent  speech  at  the  City 
Council  on  civic  affairs,  or  at  the  Hague  on  inter¬ 
national  peace.  Let  the  reader  ask  himself,  how  many 
times  he  can  remember  performing  any  of  the  following 
obvious  and  elementary  Christian  duties  : 

(i)  Replying  gently,  pleasantly,  and  in  a  gracious 
manner  to  some  unprovoked  rudeness. 

(ii)  Forgiving  some  real  injury.  I  don't  mean  consent¬ 
ing  to  say  no  more  about  it  after  an  apology  has  been 
offered,  and  one’s  pride  satisfied  by  an  admission  on  the 
offender’s  part  that  he  was  wrong,  but  quietly  and  with 
as  little  fuss  as  if  no  injury  had  ever  been  done. 

(iii)  Admitting  a  fault,  and  frankly  asking  forgiveness. 

But  if  in  private  life  few  people  believe  in  the  value  of 

the  maxims  “  Resist  not  evil/’ 1  "  Love  your  enemies,”  2 
“  Be  not  overcome  of  evil,  but  overcome  evil  with  good,” 3 
what  is  the  good  of  expecting  the  application  of  Gospel 
principles  in  the  far  more  difficult  and  complicated 
field  of  public  life  ? 

Now  I  know  that  what  I  have  just  written  will  irritate 
many  of  my  readers.  Let  me  therefore  say  two  things 
quite  plainly.  Firstly  no  one  pretends  that  it  is  easy  to 
apply  Christ’s  teaching.  Many  things,  our  own  fallen 
nature,  and  an  unchristian  environment,  and  the  low 
standards  of  professedly  Christian  society,  and  our  own 
and  our  country’s  past,  all  combine  to  make  it  difficult. 
But  just  because  it  is  difficult  we  must  begin  where  it 

1  S.  Matt.  v.  39.  2  S.  Matt.  v.  44. 

3  Rom.  xii.  21. 


no 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


is  easiest,  namely  in  private  life.  If  all  professing 
Christians,  for  a  generation,  would  try  to  put  the  Sermon 
on  the  Mount  into  practice  in  private  life  we  might  then 
be  ready  to  practice  it  in  national  and  international 
affairs. 

But  there  is  a  second  thing  to  be  said.  Many  really 
good  people  believe  not  merely  that  they  can’t  act  in 
this  way  but  that  they  ought  not  to  do  so.  Not  to 
punish  the  wicked,  they  say,  is  to  encourage  sinners  to 
do  evil.  They  really  believe  in  punishment.  They 
believe  evil  can  be  overcome  by  force.  All  honest 
beliefs  must  be  respected.  If  anyone  thinks  it  a  duty 
to  punish  he  must  do  so.  But  surely  there  is  also  a 
duty  on  everybody  to  test  the  truth  of  their  beliefs. 
“Prove  all  things;  hold  fast  that  which  is  good.”1 
Let  anyone  try,  in  dealing  with  children,  servants, 
young  people,  and  others,  the  effects  of  refusing  to 
use  force,  and  relying  on  gentleness  and  reason,  and  he 
will  be  astonished.  Only  when  he  finds  the  method 
fail  let  him  look  to  it  careful,  and  see  whether  the 
failure  is  not  really  in  himself.  I  will  venture  on  a 
personal  statement.  I  have  been  working  with  boys 
for  more  than  35  years.  I  have  punished  some,  but  I 
can  never  remember  any,  even  the  slightest,  good 
coming  of  it.  I  have  discarded  punishment  for  years 
with  the  happiest  results.  I  have,  of  course,  had  my 
failures.  But  even  then  I  have  always  felt  that  the 
failure  was  really  in  myself.  If  I  had  cared  for  the  boy 
more,  and  had  more  faith  in  the  good  in  him,  and  refused 
more  steadily  to  be  annoyed  by  the  evil,  I  should  have 
succeeded.  God  succeeds  by  believing  the  best  about 


1  1  Thess.  v.  21. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS 


hi 


us,  and  by  having  patience.  We  must  strive  to  learn 
and  apply  God’s  methods  if  we  desire  to  see  His  Kingdom 
come. 

And  how  are  we  to  fight  the  third  great  evil,  Lust  ? 
It  would  be  absurd  to  deal  with  this  gigantic  question 
at  the  end  of  a  volume.  But  one  or  two  things  are  worth 
saying. 

Firstly,  we  shall  never  hope  to  curb  and  control 
sexual  passion  while  other  bodily  desires  are  left  un¬ 
checked.  How  can  we  hope  to  curb  the  fiercest  of  bodily 
desires  while  in  matters  of  getting  up  in  the  morning 
or  going  to  bed  at  night,  in  matters  of  accepting  or 
refusing  what  we  like  at  table,  or  in  matters  of  drink, 
sweets,  and  tobacco,  the  body  is  master.  A  Christianity 
with  no  note  of  asceticism  will  always  be  powerless  in 
the  world. 

Secondly,  we  need  to  let  psychology  teach  us  the  power 
of  suggestion.  The  message  of  psychology  to-day  is 
of  the  boundless  power  of  the  imagination.  What  then 
is  the  result  of  the  daily,  I  might  almost  say  hourly, 
suggestion  that  sexual  passion  is  the  one  important 
thing  in  life  ?  I  see  in  the  street  ten  or  twelve  pretty 
little  girls,  of  the  senior  class,  just  out  of  Day  School, 
giggling  at  a  shop  window.  They  are  looking  at  a 
windowful  of  picture  postcards  all  as  indecent  and 
suggestive  as  the  police  will  allow.  I  come  in  and  open 
the  latest  popular  novel  sent  me  by  the  publishers. 
Its  lesson  is  that  passion,  mis-called  love,  is  something 
for  which  a  man  or  woman  should  sacrifice  everything 
else.  In  the  press,  at  the  theatre,  by  every  voice  of 
art,  of  literature,  the  same  lesson  is  taught.  Yet  it  is 
not  true.  In  many  of  the  richest,  fullest,  deepest 


112 


PERSONAL  RELIGION  AND 


and  most  vivid  lives  passion  has  played,  and  is  playing 
but  a  small  part.  In  all  the  best  lives  it  is  curbed  and 
restrained,  is  servant,  not  master.  I  do  not  believe  that, 
even  for  the  clergy,  unless  a  man  has  a  special  vocation 
for  it,  the  celibate  life  is  any  higher  than  the  married. 
I  am  certain  that  for  most  men  and  women  there  is  no 
nobler  training  school  of  character  than  the  married 
state.  I  have  already  quoted  my  friend’s  testimony, 
“  Since  I  and  my  wife  were  married  we  have  fewer 
pleasures,  but  more  happiness.”  But  here  too  a  note 
of  Christian  asceticism  is  needed.  Till  we  have  met 
the  assertion  of  the  world  that  sexual  passion  is  the 
chief  power  in  the  world,  and  the  one  before  which 
everything  else  does  and  should  go  down,  with  a  defiant 
No,  we  are  not  ready  to  bring  in  the  Kingdom  of  God. 

Thirdly  Christians  must  be  on  their  guard  against  the 
view  that  since  vice  can’t  be  prevented  it  is  our  duty  to 
make  it  as  little  dangerous  to  health  as  possible.  Many 
excellent  people  are  carried  away  by  these  specious 
doctrines.  There  is  no  “  safe  ”  way  of  vice,  and  the  only 
way  of  safety,  whether  for  a  man  himself  or  for  innocent 
third  parties,  is  the  way  of  self-restraint.  All  attempts, 
in  the  past,  to  make  vice  safe  from  the  health  point  of 
view  have  but  increased  the  evil 
Fourthly  Christian  men  and  women  should  study 
moral  questions  and  try  to  acquaint  themselves  with  facts. 
It  is  not  right  to  say  that  we  dislike  such  topics,  and  do 
not  care  to  hear  them  discussed.  “  My  people  are 
destroyed  for  lack  of  knowledge.”  1 

So  we  end  where  we  set  out  from.  Why  does  the 
Kingdom  of  God  tarry  ?  Why  is  its  realization  delayed  ? 

1  Hosea  iv.  6. 


PUBLIC  RIGHTEOUSNESS  113 

Because  you  and  I  and  all  men  are  not  good  enough- 
Because  our  religion  is  not  sufficiently  our  own,  based 
on  real  spiritual  experience.  Because  our  knowledge  is 
too  small,  our  will  too  weak,  or  love  too  cold.  We  need 
a  great  advance  in  personal  religion. 

THE  END 


i 


Printed  by  Fox  Jo.\TE3&  Co., 
Kemp  Hall  Press,  High  Street,  Oxford. 


e 


Date  P 


t 


' 


